Typically, when theorists speak of “new” media they mean to denote by the term digital media in particular. And since digital media are in fact still consolidating their hold over the formation, archiving, circulation and communication of information today in ways that demand serious scrutiny, I will mostly be sticking to that understanding myself through what follows. But it is important to remember all the same that there are always newer new media bubbling up in the froth for which the enabling technologies, working assumptions, and expected effects are likely to be importantly different from the ones that preoccupy our attentions for now.
Like the dissertation itself, my blog-posts have often registered the preoccupying tug of tantalizing developments emerging out of but somewhat perpendicular to what are commonly called the “New” Media –- that is to say, digital networked information and communications technologies. I am beginning to think of these emerging technologies, capacities, and quandaries as the “Next-New” or a “Newer-New” Media: And by these I would mean to describe media formations arising especially from the conjunction of digital networks with reproductive and therapeutic/enhancement medicine and bio-technologies, with nanoscale sensors and biometric surveillance techniques, from contentious legal debates about biopiracy and the patenting of genetic information, from the re-articulation of legal rights-bearing consensual subjects into “experimental” subjects embedded in bioremedial networks of medical information and environmental risk-assessment, and from a stew of comparable developments.
There will be (or certainly should be) significant differences in the discussion of media and surveillance, depending on whether one wants to focus on issues of digital encryption or on biometrics instead. There will be differences in the discussion of media and intellectual property, depending on whether one wants to focus on the copyright of digital texts or on the patenting genetic information. There will be differences in the discussion of media and the manufacture of consent, depending on whether one wants to focus on the consolidation of broadcast media, the rise of social software tools and practices, or the mandated use of neuroceuticals on the basis of public medical information and prevailing therapeutic opinions.
While these bio-media networks and technologies are all arising out of the legal, cultural, technical outburst of digital media technologies and the still emerging personal and public prosthetic practices these are incubating to this day, it seems to me that even as they are taking up digital media and networks as their own point of departure they are transforming this already unsteady terrain in unexpected and for now powerfully unpredictable ways.
Honestly, to the extent that “new” media really are expected to be something new, it is hard to imagine a temperament less suited in some ways to think about these impacts than philosophers and critical theorists. Philosophy paints its Hegelian gray on gray, after all, only when a form of life has grown cold. And true to form, even relatively recent and influential “new” media theory often seems somewhat quaint in its assumptions quite soon after it has been written.
Consider two relatively recent academic anthologies, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, published in 1999, and The New Media Reader, published in 2003. Both volumes represent efforts to do more than survey the scene of new media criticism as a given field, but in an important sense to constitute and stabilize that field as a scholarly discourse in the first place.
The introductions to these volumes seem to be especially freighted with anxiety, together with appealing compensatory moments of reckless daring. They have the keen self-consciousness of inaugural moments, not only as jumping off points for the complex and wonderfully idiosyncratic books they happen to preface, but as the possible constructive beginnings of something that might, with luck, take on a broader kind of cultural and institutional life. There are times when it feels as though the authors of these anxious and hopeful introductions were hunched over their writing desks bravely trying to ignore all the while the grand pianos suspended above their heads as they wrote.
“Introductions to collections of essays about digital culture generally begin by justifying the perverse,” rather perversely begins the very first sentence of Peter Lunenfeld’s “Introduction” to the volume he also edited, The Digital Dialectic. Later in the essay he describes the dilemma with which he finds media criticism is grappling quite bluntly, maintaining that “the digital is difficult to delineate because of its relative freshness.” Later still he amplifies this point, arguing that “theory demands from its objects a certain stability, [but… t]he pressures of the market and the innovations of the laboratory combine to make stability impossible within the practice of digital media.”
His opening paragraph ends quite programmatically: “At this moment, digital culture has been so thoroughly hyped in every forum from television to academic journals to the World Wide Web that new commentaries need justification less than they require the kind of logic and style we demand of serious discourse on anything else.” But just what kind of logic and style will satisfy his demand for “seriousness” here? Between his initial conjuration of perversity and his eventual demand for seriousness, Lunenfeld squints his eyes suspiciously at efforts at criticism that “offer models, exemplars, and/or apologias.” Given the inherent instability of its object, and his dissatisfaction with so many of the conventional strategies through which criticism typically takes its measure of distance to scrutinize its objects in all seriousness, what does Lunenfeld offer up as a useful alternative?
Lunenfeld proposes a “serious” digital media criticism that would “lodge [itself] in the dialectic.” This he defines promisingly but a bit broadly as “grounding the insights of theory in the constraints of practice.” Unfortunately, Lunenfeld devotes most of what remains of his essay to interesting but mostly straightforwardly descriptive historical surveys of the terms “digital” and “dialectic”and is never as clear as I would like him to be about just how the suggestion that the media critic “lodge oneself in the dialectic” finally plays out so differently in critical practice than the exercises in hype and self-justification that worry him elsewhere, whether such a more dialectical criticism is uniquely exemplified in the critical practice of the admittedly very satisfying and provocative essays that follow in the volume, or just why these more dialectical methods, if that is what they are, really finally are “serious” in ways alternate critical essays about digital media presumably are not.
In the absence of more specifics, the term “dialectic” seems to provide an occasion to mistake as a rigorous and therefore serious methodology a broadly recurring ritual of interpretation that finds its way into most of the essays of the volume. In this characteristic gesture, a rather exhilarated technophilic hype that inspires deranging false hopes is arrayed against a countervailing disasterbatory technophobia that inspires unhelpful panic, passivity, or banal consumerism. Or, in a closely complementary variant, a dream of technoconstituted superhumanization via prosthetic augmentation is distinguished from a dread of technoconstituted dehumanization via subordination to monstrous automated systems. The critic effuses compellingly about these pathological extremes for some time, highlighting the quirks of their adherents and the wildly unrealistic predictions and preoccupations they inevitably seem to inspire, noting the ways in which they confuse one’s perceptions of present prosthetic practices or the ways in which they seduce one into falsely teleological accounts of technological development. In closing, the critic goes on to locate himself at a more moderate or ironical remove from each of these extremes, and then sounds a cautionary note about just how irresistible hyperbole finally turns out to be where technological discourse is concerned.
This moment of the repudiation of both technophilia and technophobia, by the way, has come to represent perhaps the definitive gesture through which technocritical discourse announces itself as such at this point. Believe me, I am too well aware of the extent to which my own moves can be said to genuflect in the general direction of this basic strategy of reading to seem too dismissive in identifying it in others. But I am skeptical that this general sensibility, however indispensable it may be, constitutes a methodological resource sufficiently consolidating to overcome the anxieties of media critics in a moment of disciplinary foundation, especially as they contemplate the ineradicably mercurial aspects of their objects of fascination.
In his Introduction to The New Media Reader, “New Media from Borges to HTML,” Lev Manovich registers a comparable sense of occasion as did Lunenfeld in his own. The appearance of the volume for which he contributes the Introduction represents, Manovich proposes, “a milestone in the history of a new field,” and one that inspires as the ambitions of his essay, first, “the theoretical challenge of defining what new media actually is,” as well as “sketch[ing] the history of the field” itself.
“If we are to look at any modern cultural field sociologically,” Manovich suggests, one will do well to “[measure] its standing by the number and the importance of cultural institutions devoted to it such as museum exhibitions, festivals, publications, conferences, and so on.” There is little doubt for me that the “sociological” in this formulation is functioning as Manovich’s version of the “seriousness” Lunenfeld pined after himself. And it seems likely that, again, as for Lunenfeld, the appeal of such seriousness for Manovich is the special legitimation he hopes it might confer in its scientificity on a discipline that is not only a fledgling one, but one for which the objects are especially inscrutable in their conspicuous instability.
Where Lunenfeld seems ultimately to retreat into the highly philosophically respectable but rather broad conceptual generality of the dialectic as his own critical foothold against the radically mercurial character of the technical, figural, textual prosthetic practices that constitute the shifting field of digital networked media, Manovich seems to retreat instead into the comparable respectability of a scientificity of documentary detail.
That this is a characteristic gesture for Manovich rather than simply a conceit that organizes the initial throat-clearing moves in his Introduction is quite clear when he goes on to define new media precisely through a forceful distinction of it from what he calls “cyberculture” or cybercultural studies. This he defines as “the study of various social phenomena associated with Internet and other new [?] forms of network communication.” But what he goes on to italicize about sense of the cyberculture is its “emphasis on… social phenomena.” In this, he insists, “cyberculture does not directly deal with new cultural objects enabled by network communications technologies.” And from this conspicuous contrast comes Manovich’s definition of new media studies: “The study of these objects is the domain of new media.”
This fetishization of the describable object bespeaks the lure of a more scientific respectability for media criticism in Manovich, I would suggest. But the “objects” of new media are, if they are anything at all, incorrigible shape-shifters.
While I agree that a documentary registration of contemporary prosthetic practices of research, invention, training, use, re-appropriation, figuration, and collaboration should certainly be indispensable to a living and relevant technocriticism of digital networked information, communication, and media technologies, it seems to me especially problematic to fix these documentary energies only on objects treated reductively as artifacts rather than as multiform personal and public practices. Such a commitment would seem to me to threaten to impoverish media critics either to the role of musty archivists for long or recently dead media forms or to that of bleeding-edge hipsters uncritically fixated on evanescing media forms, most of which will likewise boil off into marginality before the new media documentarian could find critical purchase in them in any case. Or, as Manovich puts the point himself, “as most artists c[o]me to routinely use these new media, the field is facing a danger of becoming a ghetto whose participants would be united by [no more than] their fetishism of [the] latest computer technology, rather than by any deeper conceptual, ideological or aesthetic issues."
But it is unclear just how Manovich would provide a Royal Road to such “deeper” issues by his lights. His very interesting discussions of the technical capacities of contemporary technologies seem at their best to flutter at the edge of the kind of obsolescence which we already expect from our best technical manuals, while other quite useful observations of his seem to rely for their force on a concern with precisely the “social phenomena” he programmatically disdains elsewhere (as when he discusses the role of a still-prevalent star-system in his accounting of the differing levels of automation employed in the production of feature films as against video games).
Again, I will ruefully leave it as an exercise for the reader to discern, denigrate, and deride the many moments in the pages that follow this, my own prefatory gesture, in which I will go on to exhibit all of the frailties I lament here and much worse myself as I sketch my surveys of the developmental scene as a technical and figural ferment, and propose my own immodest interventions into our sense of it.
One quite promising methodology Manovich briefly discusses in his introduction, and which I would be pleased to model better in my own work, is the theory of media archeology proposed by Erkki Huhtamo (who provides an example of this work in his contribution of an essay to Peter Lunenfeld’s Digital Dialectic volume).
Huhtamo suggests that “underneath the changing surface of machine culture there are tenacious and long-lived undercurrents, or ‘master-discourses,’ that get activated from time to time, particularly during moments of crisis or rupture.”
One might imagine a discursive treasury of technocultural “tropes." Obvious candidates for inclusion in such a tropic archive would be Icarus, the Philosopher's Stone, the immortal elixir, Frankenstein, the robot slave, the paperless office, gray goo. But strategic and figural resources more specific to particular technical discourses (the end-to-end principle is an example) demand attention from the technocultural archaeologist as well.
These tropes rather messily accumulate for Huhtamo over the course of technological developments around both realized and even merely imagined technologies, and provide an archive of potential solutions to technical problems as well as to problems of meaning to which people can make recourse in their ongoing search for ways to make sense of their techniques and their tools.
Manovich criticizes the “limitations of thinking about new media in terms of historically recurrent aesthetic strategies and ideological tropes,” even while recognizing the suggestiveness of such a critical practice. “While ideological tropes indeed seem to be re-appearing rather regularly,” he admits, “many aesthetic strategies may only reappear two or three times.” Further, he continues, “some strategies and/or tropes can be already found in the first part of the nineteenth century while others only make their appearance much more recently.” But even granting these points it is not immediately clear how Manovich’s subsequent claim follows from these qualifications. “In order for this approach to be truly useful,” he concludes, “it would insufficient to simply name the strategies and tropes and to record the moments of their appearance; instead, we would have to develop a much more comprehensive analysis.”
It is true that a tropic “archaeology” of the kind Huhtamo seems to propose would very likely fail to meet such a sweeping standard of analytic generality, but it does not seem right to accuse it of any fixated particularity (a limitation to which Manovich’s own methodological emphasis seems to me rather more susceptible in fact). I think such a tropic archaeology might be especially useful for discerning the ways in which the assumptions, policy language, customs, and regulation of emerging technologies will often rely on the selective reappropriation of forms associated with developmentally proximate technologies (or tropes that have fastened to technologies from contemporaneous but altogether different practical domains).
I have already mentioned as an example of these developmental complexities the ways in which the policies that are emerging to grapple with the disruptive impact of digital reproduction, publication, and distribution tools on intellectual property will reverberate into the subsequent discussion of the patenting of genetic information in ways that are as likely to befuddle as to illuminate practice. The same could be said about discussions of biometric surveillance to the extent that they might be shaped by prior discourses about encryption technologies. So too attitudes and arguments inspired by emerging neuroceutical and genetic medical therapies that one might expect to express a consistent outlook of either tolerance or hostility to medical “enhancement” in general, will often diverge quite radically according to what are perceived as their differing associations with the politics of the so-called war on drugs or the politics of reproductive choice, respectively, even when these associations are scientifically utterly superficial.
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Sunday, April 17, 2005
Saturday, April 16, 2005
PXI. Publicity As Relinquishment: Writing Blogtexts, Hypertexts, Tagtexts
Since the sections of the dissertation are posted in the customary chronological order onto the blog, and always with the most recently published post at the top of the text-queue, readers there confront the succession of these sections and the case they develop in an order that reverses (at least) that for a reader of the dissertation as a printed text.
Even quite regular readers of the blog might visit and find themselves immersed in what would seem an altogether arbitrary place more or less in the middle of things from the perspective of a more straightforward inhabitation and linear reading of the text. Once there, the text that “follows” as the reader scrolls onward down the screen –- assuming her attention is sufficiently compelled by what she is reading to do so in the first place -– will likely be text that had preceded the same section for readers of the printed document.
However, since the sections of the dissertation have been posted onto the blog over a period of weeks, they are interspersed with posts unrelated to the dissertation in any case. These sections jostle next to occasional posts containing commentary about current events, random quotations, and the like, not to mention posts related to the dissertation but unavailable to readers of the printed version, such as reports on the entertaining vicissitudes of my fraying state of mind while writing the dissertation itself, or extended meditations on topics originating there but which seemed perhaps too digressive or provisional or polemical for inclusion there, or what have you.
Each section of the dissertation posted to the blog provides a link to a table of contents for the dissertation as a whole which places the section in its context within the printed volume, and establishes a way to navigate the digital text that better approximates my intentions, to the extent that these are registered in the choices that have made their way to the printed version of the text in the first place. Although I have thus taken some measures to indicate and facilitate an online reader’s course along my own preferred track through the dissertation, I am well aware that this track represents an already romantic idealization of a more dedicated and straightforward reading than the presumed “stability” of print could compel in any case. And certainly the derangements of the online text, the overabundant proliferation of unpredictable pathways both into and away from the digital text exacerbate these difficulties beyond any easy reckoning.
Of course, it is already true that every text relies for its intelligibility and force on its relations to a discursive universe outside of itself. But digitexts can render such relations conspicuous precisely as part of the way in which they would essay to convey and produce meaning, actively soliciting a reader’s attention to the text as never only a registration of authorial intentions, say, but as points of entry and exit to other texts.
In digitexts marks, words, phrases, images, and other textual materials can function simultaneously as conveyances of meaning within the text and as clickable hyperlinks that become portals into different texts altogether. Digitext systems that display documents in ways that accommodate this function are called “hypertexts.”
And in digitexts marks, words, phrases, images, and other textual materials are likewise susceptible to notice by search engines as well as the tagging, bookmarking, and annotation practices of online readers in ways that make them points of entry into the text itself, often against the grain of authorial intentions or expectations. I will call digitexts whose availability on the web renders them susceptible to such proliferating points of entry “tagtexts.”
To the extent that, whatever my intentions in the matter, at least some of the readers of at least some of the content of my dissertation will have been drawn into the text online by tapping some string of terms I can scarcely fathom the significance of into a search engine that directs them to one or more of its sections, then this digitext dissertation is at once blogtext, hypertext, and tagtext.
In his classic discussion, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, George P. Landow takes as his point of departure for the discussion of digital hypertexts Michel Foucault’s figuration in his Archeology of Knowledge of books “as… node[s] within a network” for which the “frontiers… are never clear cut,” as well as Roland Barthes’ description in S/Z of every text as a “galaxy of signifiers.”
Well over a decade after the publication of Landow’s book, a researcher at University College in London, Frode Hegland, in collaboration with Doug Engelbart (the inventor of the computer mouse and a pioneer of hyptertext systems), recently created an editing program for digitexts called “Liquid Information.” This system enables readers to transform any word in an online document into what Hegland calls a “hyperword,” which is a hyperlink tag that could point to multiple locations at once. A hyperword could, but certainly need not, co-incide with an author’s own hyperlinks. And the destinations to which a hyperword might lead would be, as Hegland envisions them, extraordinarily provocative and profuse.
“Liquid Information” describes an exemplary tagtext. It might provide a way to read an author’s retrospective commentary about aspects of her own work after the passage of time along with the reading of the online work itself, or it might provide a way to follow instead the annotations of particular trusted or influential or provocative alternate readers of any digitext. Hyperwords might link to standard definitions of terms occurring in a digitext, or to substantiating or refuting evidence provided by subsequent researchers. Or these hyperwords could provide portals onto significant discussions of a piece abroad in culture, the contours of which might be determined by citational indexes or automatic aggregators of attention or information. Indeed, “Liquid Information,” or at any rate whatever comparable tagtext systems might eventually emerge, could render all of these relationships between online digitexts conspicuous all at once.
It is intriguing that Hegland quite explicitly assumes both an ideological and a developmental kinship between the capacities of tagtext and the hypertext systems introduced in the last generation of digital media. Hegland indicates significantly that he has been “working on these ideas since 1991” (a year before Landow published his book on hypertext, for instance), while Engelbart simply pronounces the “Liquid Information” project as “the next stage of the web.”
George Landow proposes that hypertext itself stands in a suggestive relationship to “[s]cholarly articles,” which long preceded them and which likewise, “situate themselves within a field of relations” in an explicit way. But even while he registers the kinship of the hyperlink to practices of scholarly citation, he is quick to insist that the different technological conditions that have presided over the expression of this generic connection render their difference a qualitative rather than quantitative one.
Even the citational references a scholarly text registers explicitly (to say nothing of its implicit, unconscious, or otherwise diasavowed textual relations) are “[kept] out of sight” he argues, “by the print medium” itself “and [are] relatively difficult to follow, because in print technology the referenced (or linked) materials lie spatially distant from the references to them.” He goes on to distinguish these from “[e]lectronic hypertext,” which, “in contrast, makes individual references easy to follow and the entire field of interconnections obvious and easy to navigate.”
The hyperlinks available to readers of this dissertation on my blog are located in roughly the same places where readers of the print publication encounter citations, but they function quite differently for me for all their similarities.
For one thing, while I provide a particular page reference within most texts for which I provide a citation, my hyperlinks will typically lead readers instead to a text that they could explore as a whole, or sometimes to a bookstore that provides an opportunity to purchase the text for the same reason (often online bookstores will provide quite a lot of supplementary discussion of the text as well as a kind of promotion, sometimes by a number of rather different sorts of readers), or perhaps to the author’s website. In part, this reflects for me a host of primarily cultural differences in my sense of my ethos as a “blogger” as against my sense of the demands appropriate to scholarly authorship, especially in the uniquely credentializing scene of the writing of a dissertation in particular.
Citations provide a record – even if it is sometimes an idealized one – of the survey of relevant literature and evidence that substantiates the claims and buttresses the judgments made over the course of a scholarly publication. And in this, they function at once to consolidate a performance of scholarly authorship as an authoritative one, while likewise stabilizing the text in its assumption of a distinctive position it presumably expresses and defends against contestation.
While hyperlinks certainly can provide an analogous function, they have always seemed to me occasions to register rather more conversational sorts of relations, and to provide opportunities for exploration that are just as likely to be tangential to the textual moment that occasions them as they are to provide substantiations of a particular position.
In this connection, it seems relevant to mention as well that the printed version of the dissertation lacks of course the “comment” function in which each section of the blogposted digitext culminates, a clickable button that affords the reader of the online version a ready opportunity to respond to the text and register impressions however and whenever they like. Since every comment to the blog is likewise posted to me instantly as an e-mail, comments there arrive at my notice in a way that is better assured a quick response, and is more likely therefore to inaugurate something like a real-time conversation, either in the intimate quasi-privacy of a subsequent e-mail exchange or in the more public exchange of comments in the comment-section associated with the post, a conversation in which who knows how many others might make their own contributions.
As it happens, I think that it is possible to exaggerate both the extent and significance of differences such as these, even while I would grant they are more than adequate to justify Landow’s attribution of a qualitative rather than simply quantitative distinction between scholarly citation practices in print publication and practices of hypertext publication.
What most interests me for the purposes of the dissertation in all this are the ways in which the condition of “publicity” unique to digitexts published online as hypertexts or transformed by social software practices into online tagtexts will demand a relinquishment by their authors of different measures of control over the terms of their reception and of the terms in which they generate meanings in the public worlds into which they have been released.
To the extent that “publication” has managed to become simultaneously a quintessential expression of the superlatively individual “genius” of the romantic authorial self, as well as a quintessential evocation of an idealized public sphere of letters, “publication” is inevitably a privileged figure through which we negotiate the terms of private and public life. And observing the ways in which emerging technologies would transform, or at any rate promise or threaten to transform, the terms of publication and so the public performance of private selves it facilitates, exerts, to say the least, an endless fascination. It is also the primary provocation for this essay.
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Even quite regular readers of the blog might visit and find themselves immersed in what would seem an altogether arbitrary place more or less in the middle of things from the perspective of a more straightforward inhabitation and linear reading of the text. Once there, the text that “follows” as the reader scrolls onward down the screen –- assuming her attention is sufficiently compelled by what she is reading to do so in the first place -– will likely be text that had preceded the same section for readers of the printed document.
However, since the sections of the dissertation have been posted onto the blog over a period of weeks, they are interspersed with posts unrelated to the dissertation in any case. These sections jostle next to occasional posts containing commentary about current events, random quotations, and the like, not to mention posts related to the dissertation but unavailable to readers of the printed version, such as reports on the entertaining vicissitudes of my fraying state of mind while writing the dissertation itself, or extended meditations on topics originating there but which seemed perhaps too digressive or provisional or polemical for inclusion there, or what have you.
Each section of the dissertation posted to the blog provides a link to a table of contents for the dissertation as a whole which places the section in its context within the printed volume, and establishes a way to navigate the digital text that better approximates my intentions, to the extent that these are registered in the choices that have made their way to the printed version of the text in the first place. Although I have thus taken some measures to indicate and facilitate an online reader’s course along my own preferred track through the dissertation, I am well aware that this track represents an already romantic idealization of a more dedicated and straightforward reading than the presumed “stability” of print could compel in any case. And certainly the derangements of the online text, the overabundant proliferation of unpredictable pathways both into and away from the digital text exacerbate these difficulties beyond any easy reckoning.
Of course, it is already true that every text relies for its intelligibility and force on its relations to a discursive universe outside of itself. But digitexts can render such relations conspicuous precisely as part of the way in which they would essay to convey and produce meaning, actively soliciting a reader’s attention to the text as never only a registration of authorial intentions, say, but as points of entry and exit to other texts.
In digitexts marks, words, phrases, images, and other textual materials can function simultaneously as conveyances of meaning within the text and as clickable hyperlinks that become portals into different texts altogether. Digitext systems that display documents in ways that accommodate this function are called “hypertexts.”
And in digitexts marks, words, phrases, images, and other textual materials are likewise susceptible to notice by search engines as well as the tagging, bookmarking, and annotation practices of online readers in ways that make them points of entry into the text itself, often against the grain of authorial intentions or expectations. I will call digitexts whose availability on the web renders them susceptible to such proliferating points of entry “tagtexts.”
To the extent that, whatever my intentions in the matter, at least some of the readers of at least some of the content of my dissertation will have been drawn into the text online by tapping some string of terms I can scarcely fathom the significance of into a search engine that directs them to one or more of its sections, then this digitext dissertation is at once blogtext, hypertext, and tagtext.
In his classic discussion, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, George P. Landow takes as his point of departure for the discussion of digital hypertexts Michel Foucault’s figuration in his Archeology of Knowledge of books “as… node[s] within a network” for which the “frontiers… are never clear cut,” as well as Roland Barthes’ description in S/Z of every text as a “galaxy of signifiers.”
Well over a decade after the publication of Landow’s book, a researcher at University College in London, Frode Hegland, in collaboration with Doug Engelbart (the inventor of the computer mouse and a pioneer of hyptertext systems), recently created an editing program for digitexts called “Liquid Information.” This system enables readers to transform any word in an online document into what Hegland calls a “hyperword,” which is a hyperlink tag that could point to multiple locations at once. A hyperword could, but certainly need not, co-incide with an author’s own hyperlinks. And the destinations to which a hyperword might lead would be, as Hegland envisions them, extraordinarily provocative and profuse.
“Liquid Information” describes an exemplary tagtext. It might provide a way to read an author’s retrospective commentary about aspects of her own work after the passage of time along with the reading of the online work itself, or it might provide a way to follow instead the annotations of particular trusted or influential or provocative alternate readers of any digitext. Hyperwords might link to standard definitions of terms occurring in a digitext, or to substantiating or refuting evidence provided by subsequent researchers. Or these hyperwords could provide portals onto significant discussions of a piece abroad in culture, the contours of which might be determined by citational indexes or automatic aggregators of attention or information. Indeed, “Liquid Information,” or at any rate whatever comparable tagtext systems might eventually emerge, could render all of these relationships between online digitexts conspicuous all at once.
It is intriguing that Hegland quite explicitly assumes both an ideological and a developmental kinship between the capacities of tagtext and the hypertext systems introduced in the last generation of digital media. Hegland indicates significantly that he has been “working on these ideas since 1991” (a year before Landow published his book on hypertext, for instance), while Engelbart simply pronounces the “Liquid Information” project as “the next stage of the web.”
George Landow proposes that hypertext itself stands in a suggestive relationship to “[s]cholarly articles,” which long preceded them and which likewise, “situate themselves within a field of relations” in an explicit way. But even while he registers the kinship of the hyperlink to practices of scholarly citation, he is quick to insist that the different technological conditions that have presided over the expression of this generic connection render their difference a qualitative rather than quantitative one.
Even the citational references a scholarly text registers explicitly (to say nothing of its implicit, unconscious, or otherwise diasavowed textual relations) are “[kept] out of sight” he argues, “by the print medium” itself “and [are] relatively difficult to follow, because in print technology the referenced (or linked) materials lie spatially distant from the references to them.” He goes on to distinguish these from “[e]lectronic hypertext,” which, “in contrast, makes individual references easy to follow and the entire field of interconnections obvious and easy to navigate.”
The hyperlinks available to readers of this dissertation on my blog are located in roughly the same places where readers of the print publication encounter citations, but they function quite differently for me for all their similarities.
For one thing, while I provide a particular page reference within most texts for which I provide a citation, my hyperlinks will typically lead readers instead to a text that they could explore as a whole, or sometimes to a bookstore that provides an opportunity to purchase the text for the same reason (often online bookstores will provide quite a lot of supplementary discussion of the text as well as a kind of promotion, sometimes by a number of rather different sorts of readers), or perhaps to the author’s website. In part, this reflects for me a host of primarily cultural differences in my sense of my ethos as a “blogger” as against my sense of the demands appropriate to scholarly authorship, especially in the uniquely credentializing scene of the writing of a dissertation in particular.
Citations provide a record – even if it is sometimes an idealized one – of the survey of relevant literature and evidence that substantiates the claims and buttresses the judgments made over the course of a scholarly publication. And in this, they function at once to consolidate a performance of scholarly authorship as an authoritative one, while likewise stabilizing the text in its assumption of a distinctive position it presumably expresses and defends against contestation.
While hyperlinks certainly can provide an analogous function, they have always seemed to me occasions to register rather more conversational sorts of relations, and to provide opportunities for exploration that are just as likely to be tangential to the textual moment that occasions them as they are to provide substantiations of a particular position.
In this connection, it seems relevant to mention as well that the printed version of the dissertation lacks of course the “comment” function in which each section of the blogposted digitext culminates, a clickable button that affords the reader of the online version a ready opportunity to respond to the text and register impressions however and whenever they like. Since every comment to the blog is likewise posted to me instantly as an e-mail, comments there arrive at my notice in a way that is better assured a quick response, and is more likely therefore to inaugurate something like a real-time conversation, either in the intimate quasi-privacy of a subsequent e-mail exchange or in the more public exchange of comments in the comment-section associated with the post, a conversation in which who knows how many others might make their own contributions.
As it happens, I think that it is possible to exaggerate both the extent and significance of differences such as these, even while I would grant they are more than adequate to justify Landow’s attribution of a qualitative rather than simply quantitative distinction between scholarly citation practices in print publication and practices of hypertext publication.
What most interests me for the purposes of the dissertation in all this are the ways in which the condition of “publicity” unique to digitexts published online as hypertexts or transformed by social software practices into online tagtexts will demand a relinquishment by their authors of different measures of control over the terms of their reception and of the terms in which they generate meanings in the public worlds into which they have been released.
To the extent that “publication” has managed to become simultaneously a quintessential expression of the superlatively individual “genius” of the romantic authorial self, as well as a quintessential evocation of an idealized public sphere of letters, “publication” is inevitably a privileged figure through which we negotiate the terms of private and public life. And observing the ways in which emerging technologies would transform, or at any rate promise or threaten to transform, the terms of publication and so the public performance of private selves it facilitates, exerts, to say the least, an endless fascination. It is also the primary provocation for this essay.
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Thursday, April 14, 2005
PX. Publicity As Relinquishment: Writing Digitexts
I composed this text on my desktop with a word processor.
I am old enough to remember well what it was like to compose lengthy papers on typewriters and legal pads, scrawling text in a cramping hand smudged with graphite or ink, erasing or crossing out words nearly as fast as I could write them, introducing supplemental points and qualifications from the margins in a swarm of snaking arrows, flipping through scribbled pages and annotations, slathering liquid paper over type-written gaffes, back-spacing, resuming again.
Like many pathologically perfectionist writers the transition into digital textual production was an ecstatic one for me, a release from the constraining meat of pulp into a realm of spirits. The enterprise of writing became for me incomparably more experimentalist, a matter of tinkering with ideas and polishing endlessly away at suggestive phrases. Writing became at once wonderfully more playful and satisfyingly more purposeful. Moreover, the results eventuating from the process of digital writing typically felt incomparably closer to my felt intentions, where typescript often emerged instead as a compromise formation reached at the point of exhaustion in a wrestling match registering less the already difficult translation of ideas into effects than the mechanical difficulties inhering in a process in which marks are simply always easier to make than to unmake.
For me, then, digital writing seemed doubly to amplify the writerly agency it succeeded: The digitization of textual production seemed first to ameliorate the labor of writing, facilitating editing and revision –- providing for the comparably effortless deletion and insertion of text, the cutting and pasting of text from one disparate location to another, and the like. And all the while digitization seemed, second, to amplify the extent to which we control the terms in which writing appears –- the disposition of margins, typefaces, the organization of information in charts and tables, the introduction of illustrations, and the like.
But, of course, the scene of digital writing is one for which the empowerment of the terms of textual production it facilitates likewise seems to be complemented by compensatory relinquishments of control over the terms of textual reception.
Because the members of my dissertation committee are busy people who are geographically dispersed, it is usually easier for everybody concerned if the digital document I have composed on my desktop is then sent off as an e-mail attachment to my readers for comments and revisions. It has often been the case that the very first time I see visceral ink-on-paper instantiations of the parts of the dissertation I have written so far will be as copies appearing in my Departmental mailbox, printed up wherever the digital versions first found their way to and then marked up with comments on the spot.
Finding the physical text in my hands is always unsettling, and almost always begins with my misrecognition of the document itself as something someone else has written. Usually I first mistake the text as a paper handed in late by a student in whatever class I am teaching at the moment, and so I am already annoyed by the thing. Then comes perplexity: The words on the page are in any case simply altogether alien at first, impossible to connect to the text that has long fixated my attention on the screen.
The typeface, the formatting, the margins will all differ uncannily from the “virtual” versions that have so long preoccupied my notice. Italicized words will sometimes have been made plain. Section headings tumble from grace and migrate incomprehensibly into the paragraphs they were meant to herald. Even the number of pages will differ from reader to reader, depending on whatever utilities they employ to read their online mail.
One of my readers reformats my documents into single-spaced texts in a smaller typeface before printing them, in an admirably conscientious effort to save paper. These versions are especially appalling to find in my mailbox. Since I fully understand that there is a very real sense in which I could write interminably about the topics that preoccupy this dissertation, and that in a sense a whole career of writing will likely digress and ramify from this scene of dissertating, I secretly think of the dissertation instead as an effort to cover certain argumentative ground in a certain number of targeted pages. All the elation of accomplishment I psychically squirrel away as my word processor piles up its virtual pages in an ongoing attainment after that target evaporates when I find these reformatted concretizations and re-imaginings of my work in my box, looking as dense as the Rosetta Stone and filling up so few pages after all.
Like the readers of my digitized dissertation who receive it as attachments to e-mail, readers of these sections on my blog will likewise see rather different forms of the text according to whichever browsers they use to read online pages and the options they have selected to shape the ways in which their browsers present these pages. I have seen my blog on other machines, for example, for which the wider spacing and hideous gigantism of the fonts their users inexplicably prefer cause my words to dilate endlessly down the screen, making them seem to me long-winded, belabored, and awkward in ways that other more considered choices would surely have avoided altogether. (Yes, I blame the fonts.)
Of course, the really modest sorts of ease and vulnerability introduced by the digitization of textual production I have discussed so far are rather mild when compared to the more deranging interventions into the stability of the authorial text introduced by digital hypertext or by the textual tagging practices enabled by social software.
Go to Next Section of Pancryptics
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I am old enough to remember well what it was like to compose lengthy papers on typewriters and legal pads, scrawling text in a cramping hand smudged with graphite or ink, erasing or crossing out words nearly as fast as I could write them, introducing supplemental points and qualifications from the margins in a swarm of snaking arrows, flipping through scribbled pages and annotations, slathering liquid paper over type-written gaffes, back-spacing, resuming again.
Like many pathologically perfectionist writers the transition into digital textual production was an ecstatic one for me, a release from the constraining meat of pulp into a realm of spirits. The enterprise of writing became for me incomparably more experimentalist, a matter of tinkering with ideas and polishing endlessly away at suggestive phrases. Writing became at once wonderfully more playful and satisfyingly more purposeful. Moreover, the results eventuating from the process of digital writing typically felt incomparably closer to my felt intentions, where typescript often emerged instead as a compromise formation reached at the point of exhaustion in a wrestling match registering less the already difficult translation of ideas into effects than the mechanical difficulties inhering in a process in which marks are simply always easier to make than to unmake.
For me, then, digital writing seemed doubly to amplify the writerly agency it succeeded: The digitization of textual production seemed first to ameliorate the labor of writing, facilitating editing and revision –- providing for the comparably effortless deletion and insertion of text, the cutting and pasting of text from one disparate location to another, and the like. And all the while digitization seemed, second, to amplify the extent to which we control the terms in which writing appears –- the disposition of margins, typefaces, the organization of information in charts and tables, the introduction of illustrations, and the like.
But, of course, the scene of digital writing is one for which the empowerment of the terms of textual production it facilitates likewise seems to be complemented by compensatory relinquishments of control over the terms of textual reception.
Because the members of my dissertation committee are busy people who are geographically dispersed, it is usually easier for everybody concerned if the digital document I have composed on my desktop is then sent off as an e-mail attachment to my readers for comments and revisions. It has often been the case that the very first time I see visceral ink-on-paper instantiations of the parts of the dissertation I have written so far will be as copies appearing in my Departmental mailbox, printed up wherever the digital versions first found their way to and then marked up with comments on the spot.
Finding the physical text in my hands is always unsettling, and almost always begins with my misrecognition of the document itself as something someone else has written. Usually I first mistake the text as a paper handed in late by a student in whatever class I am teaching at the moment, and so I am already annoyed by the thing. Then comes perplexity: The words on the page are in any case simply altogether alien at first, impossible to connect to the text that has long fixated my attention on the screen.
The typeface, the formatting, the margins will all differ uncannily from the “virtual” versions that have so long preoccupied my notice. Italicized words will sometimes have been made plain. Section headings tumble from grace and migrate incomprehensibly into the paragraphs they were meant to herald. Even the number of pages will differ from reader to reader, depending on whatever utilities they employ to read their online mail.
One of my readers reformats my documents into single-spaced texts in a smaller typeface before printing them, in an admirably conscientious effort to save paper. These versions are especially appalling to find in my mailbox. Since I fully understand that there is a very real sense in which I could write interminably about the topics that preoccupy this dissertation, and that in a sense a whole career of writing will likely digress and ramify from this scene of dissertating, I secretly think of the dissertation instead as an effort to cover certain argumentative ground in a certain number of targeted pages. All the elation of accomplishment I psychically squirrel away as my word processor piles up its virtual pages in an ongoing attainment after that target evaporates when I find these reformatted concretizations and re-imaginings of my work in my box, looking as dense as the Rosetta Stone and filling up so few pages after all.
Like the readers of my digitized dissertation who receive it as attachments to e-mail, readers of these sections on my blog will likewise see rather different forms of the text according to whichever browsers they use to read online pages and the options they have selected to shape the ways in which their browsers present these pages. I have seen my blog on other machines, for example, for which the wider spacing and hideous gigantism of the fonts their users inexplicably prefer cause my words to dilate endlessly down the screen, making them seem to me long-winded, belabored, and awkward in ways that other more considered choices would surely have avoided altogether. (Yes, I blame the fonts.)
Of course, the really modest sorts of ease and vulnerability introduced by the digitization of textual production I have discussed so far are rather mild when compared to the more deranging interventions into the stability of the authorial text introduced by digital hypertext or by the textual tagging practices enabled by social software.
Go to Next Section of Pancryptics
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PIX. Blogos
Given the ease with which I can make the facile play on words contained in the title of this chapter ["Problog"], and then again, in slightly different form, in the heading for the chapter’s second part ["Prologue/blogpost"], and then yet again in the title for this section, it may be a bit surprising to discover that the log at the heart of the term “weblog” is actually different from the log at the heart of the word “prologue.”
The term “prologue,” which is roughly synonymous with “preface,” comes to us by way of the French, and originates in the Greek logos, speech, reason, word.
The term “blog” -– from “web-log” you will remember –- derives instead from “log-book,” a term that describes a chronological record and itself derives more specifically from the record-books of ocean-going vessels which calculated their rate of motion over time by means of an apparatus called a log-board, log-slate, or log-chip. The log-board was originally a thin quadrant of wood loaded with lead to make it float still and upright, attached to an on-board log-line divided into equal segments (called knots). The log-board was tossed overboard for a half-minute, during which time the number of knots that would unreel from the pull of the stationary board would register the actual distance traveled by the vessel and from which its velocity was then calculated and recorded.
The log in “blog” is connected then to timber, to the “log” that is a felled tree.
“Logging” describes the enterprise of clearing a forest of its trees and leaving behind a benuded blank where woods once stood, while at once describing the enterprise of filling a blank page derived from that wood with a record of words.
With the digitization of textual production especially the “log” in blog has become a driftwood itself, listing conspicuously away from wood into word, from log toward logos.
The material of the prologue you are reading right now first appeared as a series of individual posts to my personal blog, Amor Mundi. I first began posting these sections onto the blog on Friday, April 9, 2005. The post that corresponds to the section you are reading at this moment, appeared there on Thursday morning, April 14. It is worthwhile to think about some of the ways in which the versions differ.
Go to Next Section of Pancryptics
Go to Pancryptics Table of Contents
The term “prologue,” which is roughly synonymous with “preface,” comes to us by way of the French, and originates in the Greek logos, speech, reason, word.
The term “blog” -– from “web-log” you will remember –- derives instead from “log-book,” a term that describes a chronological record and itself derives more specifically from the record-books of ocean-going vessels which calculated their rate of motion over time by means of an apparatus called a log-board, log-slate, or log-chip. The log-board was originally a thin quadrant of wood loaded with lead to make it float still and upright, attached to an on-board log-line divided into equal segments (called knots). The log-board was tossed overboard for a half-minute, during which time the number of knots that would unreel from the pull of the stationary board would register the actual distance traveled by the vessel and from which its velocity was then calculated and recorded.
The log in “blog” is connected then to timber, to the “log” that is a felled tree.
“Logging” describes the enterprise of clearing a forest of its trees and leaving behind a benuded blank where woods once stood, while at once describing the enterprise of filling a blank page derived from that wood with a record of words.
With the digitization of textual production especially the “log” in blog has become a driftwood itself, listing conspicuously away from wood into word, from log toward logos.
The material of the prologue you are reading right now first appeared as a series of individual posts to my personal blog, Amor Mundi. I first began posting these sections onto the blog on Friday, April 9, 2005. The post that corresponds to the section you are reading at this moment, appeared there on Thursday morning, April 14. It is worthwhile to think about some of the ways in which the versions differ.
Go to Next Section of Pancryptics
Go to Pancryptics Table of Contents
Sunday, April 10, 2005
PXII. Digital Expressivity, Digital Credibility
The digital production, reproduction, publication, circulation, and annotation of texts, as well as the ongoing convergence via digitization of existing media formats and archives, and other emerging social and collaborative practices empowered by digital networks are transforming more than the conditions of discursive and especially textual expressivity. Just as significantly, digitality is transforming the conditions by means of which the universe of expressed information is organized and presented as relatively worthy in the face of our conspicuously limited attentions, as well as authorized and recommended as relatively trustworthy in the face of our conspicuously unlimited vulnerability to error and abuse. All of this is just to say, the ongoing digitization of textuality transforms the terms of both textual expressivity and the terms in which credibility subsequently attaches to texts in the world. Digitality alters the terms of both textual creativity and selectivity.
Consider how the vanishingly small cost of the digital reproduction of texts, and the ease of the instantaneous global publication and distribution of such texts on digital networks like the World Wide Web have profoundly altered the traditional constraints represented by the old mechanical bottleneck of the relatively higher historical cost of copying and circulating physical press-printed texts, even while “copyright” remains for now the privileged location for the adjudication of social disputes about the proper support of creative work.
Since computers generate at any rate an ephemeral “copy” of a text any time it is accessed at all, then in the domain of digital networks simply attending to a text is usually, after a fashion, to copy it. And, indeed, given the ever more widespread practice of the publication of annotations and commentary on online texts, often more or less in “real-time,” “reading” in the digital domain can be a practice in which consumption, production, and reproduction are all continuous, even collapsed into a single act. In a breathtakingly short space of time, recent technological developments have called into question even the most basic assumptions that have historically accrued and become “natural” concerning the role of copyright in the support, calculation, and preservation of creative value.
These developments have been, to say the least, an occasion for panic among established authorities in the so-called “culture industry” – the film and recording industries and mainstream broadcast media networks, for example. The last few years have borne witness to absurd extensions of the legal term of copyright enforcement, draconian and comically ineffectual crackdowns on file-trading practices, paranoid policing of the public circulation of corporate trademarks, severe limitations on the fair use of published work on which researchers and artists have traditionally relied to increase the sum of human knowledge, and an ongoing corporate denigration of the role of an informational or cultural commons as an ongoing provocation and as an archive to which creative and innovative work makes almost inevitable recourse. Under these circumstances copyright regimes often seem not only to fail to promote the innovation for which they were initially implemented but in an important sense to actively and even devastatingly frustrate that innovation.
Meanwhile, the ease with which content can now be published and circulated via digital networks has inspired such an altogether unprecedented outpouring of creativity, innovative work, and freely available content it has become increasingly difficult to justify the conventional wisdom that the protection of copyright is necessary to promote innovative work in the first place.
Clay Shirky has pointed out that creative people often seem to crave attention in a way that publishers rarely grasp properly in its full force and significance. But “[p]rior to the [arrival of the] internet,” he writes, “this [never] ma[d]e much difference. The expense of publishing and distributing printed material is too great for it to be given away freely and in unlimited quantities – even vanity press books come with a price tag. Now, however, a single individual can serve an audience in the hundreds of thousands, as a hobby, with nary a publisher in sight.”
The threat of the Web to traditional publishers was already palpable to nearly everyone by the 1990s, but it was still widely assumed that something recognizably like conventional publishers might provide a kind of functional filtering through the deliriously swelling mass of free content to the more relevant, reliable, excellent, or original works interred within, a service still well worth paying for. But this assumption, too, is now giving way before the sheer torrent of good or at any rate good-enough work that is still proliferating endlessly on line.
More interesting to me by far, however, are the folk practices of ranking, classification, and association facilitated by digital networks and social software called “folksonomies” (a portmanteau compressing the phrase “folk taxonomy,” coined by Thomas Vander Wal ). Folksonomic reputation aggregators, online tagging, bookmarking, and annotation practices, wikis that solicit both contributions of free content but also solicit their own interminable revision, clarification, editing and fact-checking, are all beginning to provide a glimpse of the ways in which the Web as a space of free expressivity might come to provide a comparable space of cheap credibility, reliability, and reputation.
The publishing, recording, film and broadcasting industries have long functioned not only to produce and distribute cultural work, but to focus and assess the tidal movements of mass attention on the ongoing swell of that work. Confronted with charges of indecency and disruption, representatives of the mass-culture industries have usually been quite content to insist that they hold up a mirror that reflects the world as it is rather than imposing any vision of their own upon it and for which they might be accountable. But confronted instead with the noisy explosion of inexhaustible expressivity from their once relatively captive, comparatively passive broadcast audiences (even granting the fully agentic possibilities of critical and subversive receptivity available to consumers of mass-culture), an expressivity that actually reflects more and more of this world over which they have smugly presided so long, it is amusing indeed to observe the eagerness and passion with which the monoliths of the culture industry will now offer up an altogether contradictory self-congratulatory fable proposing instead their indispensable role as “gatekeepers” in heaven-only-knows-what presumably civilizing mission, directing worthy cultural material to the grateful masses as a way to account for, not to mention maintain, the extraordinary authority and wealth they have shored up so far.
Needless to say, this rather surreally implausible retroactive re-invention of the mainstream media, communications, and information industries is not one that has compelled an assent comparable to the force of the case for their indispensability back when the means of mass-cultural production, the presses, the studios, the broadcast towers, and the like really were concentrated more or less in the hands of so few.
And needless to say neither is it exactly lost on me that these forces whose motions I am discerning and documenting and responding to in this moment might threaten to sweep me off of my feet just as well. To the extent that I take seriously the force of folksonomic social practices in digital networked cultures what will it finally mean to have participated as I am, here and now, in a professionalizing ritual of publication, before a community of scholars into whose company I would thereby achieve membership, empowered through this specialized publication precisely to confer judgments of credibility and worth on textual productions across culture as my professional, professorial vocation?
I have already mentioned that the writing of a dissertation is never only the scene of writing it seems to be, but is always also in its heart of hearts a ritual of professionalization. And I will be the first to admit that I am a person who behaves badly in scenes of interpellation. It’s not that I don’t crave the intelligibility conferred by a Good Call, but it’s just that I am flighty and lazy and easily distracted. Not to mention that I suspect nearly everyone of being an Undercover Cop. “You!”s ring out from the crowd, interminably, from all directions, all of them irresistibly glamorous, and turning, turning, turning to take in their salutation and demand I find myself too dizzy and too dazzled to be too docile, really.
Richard Rorty has proposed that the best function for the American “literary” professoriate is “to stir things up, to make our society feel guilty, to keep it off balance,” but then ruefully concedes that “nobody can afford to make this fully explicit and public.” As it happens, I can cheerfully affirm this as a description in broad strokes of quite a lot that I want to see happening in my own writing and pedagogy. The academy, Rorty intones, “cannot say that the taxpayers employ us to make sure that their children will think differently than they do[, even if, s]omewhere deep down, everybody – even the average taxpayer – knows that that is one of the things colleges and universities are for.”
Quite apart from the fact that it is always an appealing idea as far as I'm concerned to affirm the indispensability of a location in culture that lives for poetry and pleasure, it occurs to me this is also a role for the “humanistic” academy (that part of higher education not reducible to vocational training or scientific research) that does not look to be too readily displaced by digital networked folksonomic practices of credible amateur scholarship in projects to obtain reproducible results and warranted descriptions, while looking at once eminently complementary to digital networked practices of expressivity in projects of self-creation hungry for professional attentions and support.
Go to Next Section of Pancryptics
Go to Table of Contents
Consider how the vanishingly small cost of the digital reproduction of texts, and the ease of the instantaneous global publication and distribution of such texts on digital networks like the World Wide Web have profoundly altered the traditional constraints represented by the old mechanical bottleneck of the relatively higher historical cost of copying and circulating physical press-printed texts, even while “copyright” remains for now the privileged location for the adjudication of social disputes about the proper support of creative work.
Since computers generate at any rate an ephemeral “copy” of a text any time it is accessed at all, then in the domain of digital networks simply attending to a text is usually, after a fashion, to copy it. And, indeed, given the ever more widespread practice of the publication of annotations and commentary on online texts, often more or less in “real-time,” “reading” in the digital domain can be a practice in which consumption, production, and reproduction are all continuous, even collapsed into a single act. In a breathtakingly short space of time, recent technological developments have called into question even the most basic assumptions that have historically accrued and become “natural” concerning the role of copyright in the support, calculation, and preservation of creative value.
These developments have been, to say the least, an occasion for panic among established authorities in the so-called “culture industry” – the film and recording industries and mainstream broadcast media networks, for example. The last few years have borne witness to absurd extensions of the legal term of copyright enforcement, draconian and comically ineffectual crackdowns on file-trading practices, paranoid policing of the public circulation of corporate trademarks, severe limitations on the fair use of published work on which researchers and artists have traditionally relied to increase the sum of human knowledge, and an ongoing corporate denigration of the role of an informational or cultural commons as an ongoing provocation and as an archive to which creative and innovative work makes almost inevitable recourse. Under these circumstances copyright regimes often seem not only to fail to promote the innovation for which they were initially implemented but in an important sense to actively and even devastatingly frustrate that innovation.
Meanwhile, the ease with which content can now be published and circulated via digital networks has inspired such an altogether unprecedented outpouring of creativity, innovative work, and freely available content it has become increasingly difficult to justify the conventional wisdom that the protection of copyright is necessary to promote innovative work in the first place.
Clay Shirky has pointed out that creative people often seem to crave attention in a way that publishers rarely grasp properly in its full force and significance. But “[p]rior to the [arrival of the] internet,” he writes, “this [never] ma[d]e much difference. The expense of publishing and distributing printed material is too great for it to be given away freely and in unlimited quantities – even vanity press books come with a price tag. Now, however, a single individual can serve an audience in the hundreds of thousands, as a hobby, with nary a publisher in sight.”
The threat of the Web to traditional publishers was already palpable to nearly everyone by the 1990s, but it was still widely assumed that something recognizably like conventional publishers might provide a kind of functional filtering through the deliriously swelling mass of free content to the more relevant, reliable, excellent, or original works interred within, a service still well worth paying for. But this assumption, too, is now giving way before the sheer torrent of good or at any rate good-enough work that is still proliferating endlessly on line.
More interesting to me by far, however, are the folk practices of ranking, classification, and association facilitated by digital networks and social software called “folksonomies” (a portmanteau compressing the phrase “folk taxonomy,” coined by Thomas Vander Wal ). Folksonomic reputation aggregators, online tagging, bookmarking, and annotation practices, wikis that solicit both contributions of free content but also solicit their own interminable revision, clarification, editing and fact-checking, are all beginning to provide a glimpse of the ways in which the Web as a space of free expressivity might come to provide a comparable space of cheap credibility, reliability, and reputation.
The publishing, recording, film and broadcasting industries have long functioned not only to produce and distribute cultural work, but to focus and assess the tidal movements of mass attention on the ongoing swell of that work. Confronted with charges of indecency and disruption, representatives of the mass-culture industries have usually been quite content to insist that they hold up a mirror that reflects the world as it is rather than imposing any vision of their own upon it and for which they might be accountable. But confronted instead with the noisy explosion of inexhaustible expressivity from their once relatively captive, comparatively passive broadcast audiences (even granting the fully agentic possibilities of critical and subversive receptivity available to consumers of mass-culture), an expressivity that actually reflects more and more of this world over which they have smugly presided so long, it is amusing indeed to observe the eagerness and passion with which the monoliths of the culture industry will now offer up an altogether contradictory self-congratulatory fable proposing instead their indispensable role as “gatekeepers” in heaven-only-knows-what presumably civilizing mission, directing worthy cultural material to the grateful masses as a way to account for, not to mention maintain, the extraordinary authority and wealth they have shored up so far.
Needless to say, this rather surreally implausible retroactive re-invention of the mainstream media, communications, and information industries is not one that has compelled an assent comparable to the force of the case for their indispensability back when the means of mass-cultural production, the presses, the studios, the broadcast towers, and the like really were concentrated more or less in the hands of so few.
And needless to say neither is it exactly lost on me that these forces whose motions I am discerning and documenting and responding to in this moment might threaten to sweep me off of my feet just as well. To the extent that I take seriously the force of folksonomic social practices in digital networked cultures what will it finally mean to have participated as I am, here and now, in a professionalizing ritual of publication, before a community of scholars into whose company I would thereby achieve membership, empowered through this specialized publication precisely to confer judgments of credibility and worth on textual productions across culture as my professional, professorial vocation?
I have already mentioned that the writing of a dissertation is never only the scene of writing it seems to be, but is always also in its heart of hearts a ritual of professionalization. And I will be the first to admit that I am a person who behaves badly in scenes of interpellation. It’s not that I don’t crave the intelligibility conferred by a Good Call, but it’s just that I am flighty and lazy and easily distracted. Not to mention that I suspect nearly everyone of being an Undercover Cop. “You!”s ring out from the crowd, interminably, from all directions, all of them irresistibly glamorous, and turning, turning, turning to take in their salutation and demand I find myself too dizzy and too dazzled to be too docile, really.
Richard Rorty has proposed that the best function for the American “literary” professoriate is “to stir things up, to make our society feel guilty, to keep it off balance,” but then ruefully concedes that “nobody can afford to make this fully explicit and public.” As it happens, I can cheerfully affirm this as a description in broad strokes of quite a lot that I want to see happening in my own writing and pedagogy. The academy, Rorty intones, “cannot say that the taxpayers employ us to make sure that their children will think differently than they do[, even if, s]omewhere deep down, everybody – even the average taxpayer – knows that that is one of the things colleges and universities are for.”
Quite apart from the fact that it is always an appealing idea as far as I'm concerned to affirm the indispensability of a location in culture that lives for poetry and pleasure, it occurs to me this is also a role for the “humanistic” academy (that part of higher education not reducible to vocational training or scientific research) that does not look to be too readily displaced by digital networked folksonomic practices of credible amateur scholarship in projects to obtain reproducible results and warranted descriptions, while looking at once eminently complementary to digital networked practices of expressivity in projects of self-creation hungry for professional attentions and support.
Go to Next Section of Pancryptics
Go to Table of Contents
Friday, April 08, 2005
What Is Technocriticism?
[UPDATE: I came soon enough to realize that the neologism "technocriticism" wasn't really necessary or even particularly useful given the existence already of Science and Technology Studies (STS) , Media/Network Studies, Environmental Justice Critique, and even the venerable Philosophy of Technology all of which, taken together, more or less cover all the ground with which technocriticism would concern itself, and already have widespread departments, organizations, canons and publications, professional cohorts, constituencies and so on.]
Technological development is an ongoing provocation on personal and public life. Indeed, in contemporary technocultures continual developmental interventions into "given" norms, laws, trading conventions, and the customary limits of architecture and morphology, as well as the fraught practices through which we struggle individually and collectively to re-weave these disruptions into provisionally meaningful relations with our histories and our hopes constitute a definitive and abiding crisis of cultural life in this historical moment.
Technocriticism is a branch of critical theory devoted to the study of technological development considered particularly as personal and social practices of research, invention, appropriation, use, distribution, discourse, and argumentative resource, rather than as the brute accumulation of a pile of useful inventions.
Technocriticism studies these prosthetic practices in both their technical and figurative dimensions, documents and analyses both their personal and their public uses, and often devotes special attention to the relations among these different uses and aspects.
Technocriticism consists in the documentation and analysis of, as well as critical engagements with, the prosthetic practices through which people individually and collectively invent, employ, and otherwise variously take up and make sense of our tools, techniques, and the multiform technocultures in which we are all of us ineradicably imbricated.
Technocritical theory can sometimes be either primarily "descriptive" or "prescriptive" in tone:
Descriptive and ethnographic forms of technocriticism can be discerned in elements of scholarship described instead as the history of technology, science and technology studies, or especially technocultural theory.
More prescriptive forms of technocriticism consist of the various branches of technoethical discourse, for example, media criticism, bioethics, neuroethics, roboethics, existential risk assessment and some elements of environmental criticism and design theory. Technoethics consists in the deliberative engagements of the multiple and contending stakeholders to the problems of technological development.
While technocultural theory and technoethical discourse are distinguishable from one another and irreducible to one another, technocriticism often analyzes associations, tensions, and interdependencies between their many dimensions and deployments.
[This blogpost reflects efforts of mine to propose an entry that could pass muster on Wikipedia for the term "Technocriticism." I was actually quite surprised to discover it wasn't already there, given the prominence of work by figures like James Boyle, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and many others. Anyway, it was a useful penance to hear the chorus of complaints that the writing in my proposed entry was hopelessly opaque and the topic utter gibberish (a prank? suggested one editor, helpfully), and offered quite a few useful lessons. Even if the entry is actually eventually effaced altogether through deletion or subsequent editing, I still consider Wikipedia a profound complement to an emerging academy that remains professional and socially indispensable and yet profoundly democratized through digitization and social software. It just may take some getting used to.]
Technological development is an ongoing provocation on personal and public life. Indeed, in contemporary technocultures continual developmental interventions into "given" norms, laws, trading conventions, and the customary limits of architecture and morphology, as well as the fraught practices through which we struggle individually and collectively to re-weave these disruptions into provisionally meaningful relations with our histories and our hopes constitute a definitive and abiding crisis of cultural life in this historical moment.
Technocriticism is a branch of critical theory devoted to the study of technological development considered particularly as personal and social practices of research, invention, appropriation, use, distribution, discourse, and argumentative resource, rather than as the brute accumulation of a pile of useful inventions.
Technocriticism studies these prosthetic practices in both their technical and figurative dimensions, documents and analyses both their personal and their public uses, and often devotes special attention to the relations among these different uses and aspects.
Technocriticism consists in the documentation and analysis of, as well as critical engagements with, the prosthetic practices through which people individually and collectively invent, employ, and otherwise variously take up and make sense of our tools, techniques, and the multiform technocultures in which we are all of us ineradicably imbricated.
Technocritical theory can sometimes be either primarily "descriptive" or "prescriptive" in tone:
Descriptive and ethnographic forms of technocriticism can be discerned in elements of scholarship described instead as the history of technology, science and technology studies, or especially technocultural theory.
More prescriptive forms of technocriticism consist of the various branches of technoethical discourse, for example, media criticism, bioethics, neuroethics, roboethics, existential risk assessment and some elements of environmental criticism and design theory. Technoethics consists in the deliberative engagements of the multiple and contending stakeholders to the problems of technological development.
While technocultural theory and technoethical discourse are distinguishable from one another and irreducible to one another, technocriticism often analyzes associations, tensions, and interdependencies between their many dimensions and deployments.
[This blogpost reflects efforts of mine to propose an entry that could pass muster on Wikipedia for the term "Technocriticism." I was actually quite surprised to discover it wasn't already there, given the prominence of work by figures like James Boyle, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and many others. Anyway, it was a useful penance to hear the chorus of complaints that the writing in my proposed entry was hopelessly opaque and the topic utter gibberish (a prank? suggested one editor, helpfully), and offered quite a few useful lessons. Even if the entry is actually eventually effaced altogether through deletion or subsequent editing, I still consider Wikipedia a profound complement to an emerging academy that remains professional and socially indispensable and yet profoundly democratized through digitization and social software. It just may take some getting used to.]
PVIII. Belly of the Beast
Of course, digital networked information and communications technologies are susceptible to indefinitely many uses. And they are incomparably more likely to express and even exacerbate the given terms of social struggle than to provide the means somehow to hurdle past or orbit over this interminable scene of struggle, whatever the fervent hopes of technophiles and technocrats may be in this regard.
Come what may, each year the number of blogs and the scope of their readership continues to proliferate deliriously across the globe for now. And the impact of these widespread and wider-spreading social software facilitated network practices on conventional media, popular culture, creative work, and political organizing appears to be as rapid, slippery, deep, and disruptive as it is finally unfathomable to those of us lodged here in the belly of this beast itself.
There is little point in wondering whether these developments presage democratic experimentalisms in collaborative oversight, assessment, and policymaking via online fora or even direct ongoing voting on policy initiatives, or will facilitate instead authoritarian consolidations of violence via surveillance and the ever more sophisticated manipulation of publicly circulating information. This is because both eventualities could so readily co-exist and neither is likely in any case to arrive in the pure forms that underwrite the technophilic and technophobic discourses that substitute for more careful technocriticism of prosthetic practices as they are emerging and being taken up in fact by people in the actually existing technocultures in which we are ineradicably immersed. And yet what could be wanted more urgently in a moment like this than for us, as Arendt would have it, to think what we are doing?
Once upon a time, computers came into the world and in no time at all, it seems, they had changed absolutely everything. Televisions arrived on the scene and managed the exact same feat, surprisingly enough, more or less concurrently. Then the computers and the televisions unexpectedly began coupling and producing queer offspring called, among other things, personal computers which changed absolutely everything again. Personal computers and telecommunications networks could scarcely be kept apart, you know, whereupon the internet burst fabulously upon the scene in a flash to change absolutely everything yet again soon thereafter. At the moment it would appear that this internet is hooking up promiscuously with cellphones, digital cameras, hand-held gaming consoles, and other mobile digital devices, and sure enough something altogether new is changing absolutely everything again even as we speak. And already one can discern a faint pheromonal insinuation of promising relations to come, of web applications migrating into contact lenses or hearing aids or medical sensors under our skins to monitor, expand, overlay our corporeal inhabitations of and interfaces with our environments in almost unfathomable intimacies.
There is definitely a part of me that would like to pretend that the preceding paragraph is a straightforward parody of the curiously reprosexual excitements that attend the prognostications of so much conventional corporate futurism. But realism demands I admit the extent to which my own presumably more “academic” discourse pays ongoing tribute to this sort of thing. I admit the discomfiting, crazy-making, and highly enjoyable kinship of some (much?) of my own technocritical, technocultural, and technoethical interventions, like so many of my favorite volumes of cyborgological academic net-jazz, to the seductions and comforts and distractions of popular science fiction and its cousin public-relations discourse.
I really do believe, you know, that even when technologies break all of what we take to be their promises they remain endlessly promising still. Even when our prostheses fail to “change our lives” in the ways we would demand of them or fear from them –- that is to say, even as our prostheses fail to deliver us from our lives, just as they fail again and again to deliver our hearts’ desire -– still, we are all of us ineluctably changed all the same through the prosthetic practices in which we invent our tools and weave them every day into our everyday lives.
Technologies persistently change our lives even while just as persistently they break our hearts. The technological imaginary may be freighted with deranging superlatives, but even as the fantastic technoconstituted disasters and paradises they inevitable conjure up and conjure with fail to materialize on the ground technologies preside nevertheless over transformations as sweeping and significant as could ever be imagined beforehand.
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Come what may, each year the number of blogs and the scope of their readership continues to proliferate deliriously across the globe for now. And the impact of these widespread and wider-spreading social software facilitated network practices on conventional media, popular culture, creative work, and political organizing appears to be as rapid, slippery, deep, and disruptive as it is finally unfathomable to those of us lodged here in the belly of this beast itself.
There is little point in wondering whether these developments presage democratic experimentalisms in collaborative oversight, assessment, and policymaking via online fora or even direct ongoing voting on policy initiatives, or will facilitate instead authoritarian consolidations of violence via surveillance and the ever more sophisticated manipulation of publicly circulating information. This is because both eventualities could so readily co-exist and neither is likely in any case to arrive in the pure forms that underwrite the technophilic and technophobic discourses that substitute for more careful technocriticism of prosthetic practices as they are emerging and being taken up in fact by people in the actually existing technocultures in which we are ineradicably immersed. And yet what could be wanted more urgently in a moment like this than for us, as Arendt would have it, to think what we are doing?
Once upon a time, computers came into the world and in no time at all, it seems, they had changed absolutely everything. Televisions arrived on the scene and managed the exact same feat, surprisingly enough, more or less concurrently. Then the computers and the televisions unexpectedly began coupling and producing queer offspring called, among other things, personal computers which changed absolutely everything again. Personal computers and telecommunications networks could scarcely be kept apart, you know, whereupon the internet burst fabulously upon the scene in a flash to change absolutely everything yet again soon thereafter. At the moment it would appear that this internet is hooking up promiscuously with cellphones, digital cameras, hand-held gaming consoles, and other mobile digital devices, and sure enough something altogether new is changing absolutely everything again even as we speak. And already one can discern a faint pheromonal insinuation of promising relations to come, of web applications migrating into contact lenses or hearing aids or medical sensors under our skins to monitor, expand, overlay our corporeal inhabitations of and interfaces with our environments in almost unfathomable intimacies.
There is definitely a part of me that would like to pretend that the preceding paragraph is a straightforward parody of the curiously reprosexual excitements that attend the prognostications of so much conventional corporate futurism. But realism demands I admit the extent to which my own presumably more “academic” discourse pays ongoing tribute to this sort of thing. I admit the discomfiting, crazy-making, and highly enjoyable kinship of some (much?) of my own technocritical, technocultural, and technoethical interventions, like so many of my favorite volumes of cyborgological academic net-jazz, to the seductions and comforts and distractions of popular science fiction and its cousin public-relations discourse.
I really do believe, you know, that even when technologies break all of what we take to be their promises they remain endlessly promising still. Even when our prostheses fail to “change our lives” in the ways we would demand of them or fear from them –- that is to say, even as our prostheses fail to deliver us from our lives, just as they fail again and again to deliver our hearts’ desire -– still, we are all of us ineluctably changed all the same through the prosthetic practices in which we invent our tools and weave them every day into our everyday lives.
Technologies persistently change our lives even while just as persistently they break our hearts. The technological imaginary may be freighted with deranging superlatives, but even as the fantastic technoconstituted disasters and paradises they inevitable conjure up and conjure with fail to materialize on the ground technologies preside nevertheless over transformations as sweeping and significant as could ever be imagined beforehand.
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PVII. Dean as Figure
Joe Trippi, the author of the book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, was also for a time the campaign manager for Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s Presidential bid in 2004. Trippi was largely credited for the Dean Campaign’s innovative use of social software tools to raise campaign funds, mobilize popular participation in the campaign, and distribute information about his candidacy.
Dean is a figure in whom both the reckless enthusiasms as well as the dashed hopes that presumably inevitably freight utopian technophilia condense with an especially illuminating ferocity. The enthusiasm generated for a time by what was widely described (perhaps without perfect justice for such a conventionally moderate American politician) as an “insurgent candidacy” arising out of the American Left was largely assimilated to befuddled rather nervous contemplations by mainstream media pundits of the role of digital networked media in particular in Dean’s campaign (and, from their perspective, the probably threateningly expanding role of digital networks in politics to come). And it is no surprise that when Dean’s campaign went on to evaporate in an embarrassing defeat in the 2004 Iowa caucuses the end of its narrative was likewise regularly assimilated through the figure of a “bursting bubble” to the kinds of irrationally exuberant hyperbole of the “dot.com” internet enthusiasms that preceded their own rather stunning failures at the turn of the millennium.
In his Iowa concession speech, Dean shouted to be heard over the enthusiastic voices of his supporters in a crowded room, not realizing that this crowd noise was filtered out for vast broadcast television and radio audiences, creating an impression for them of near hysteria as he cheered his supporters on above the din. What has been variously dubbed (now quite literally, as it happens, into any number of dance mixes, among other things) “the Dean Scream” or the “I Have a Scream Speech,” was then looped interminably over the twenty-four hour broadcast news cycle, kneaded into what had already been widely criticized as an unfair but by then effortlessly and so apparently irresistibly available mainstream narrative of Dean’s “immoderateness” and consequent “unelectability.”
And so, through the figure of Howard Dean, a narrative and argumentative frame arraying the distortive and dystopian machineries of elite broadcast media against the utopian “Netroots” democratization of social software becomes well nigh irresistible for technoprogressive media critics and enthusiasts.
That this frame arose specifically in the aftermath of Dean’s rather spectacular defeat (although Dean’s subsequent bid to be elected Chair of the Democratic National Committee, in February, 2005, which was likewise figured as an anti-establishment “insurgency” supported primarily by “Netroots” mobilization, was successful), should surely recommend some qualification at least to the optimism of its most eager advocates. Consider the extent to which corporate press releases from Diebold Election Systems -- now weighted down with suspicions in connection with the statistically curious results of the November 2004 American Presidential Election itself, in which they played, together with Dean, a significant role in the larger drama -- deployed comparably sunny technophilic stylings, dilating endlessly and cheerfully about the security, ease, and techno-enfranchisement facilitated by digitality, even as machines they developed eschewed open source, lacked reliable authentication mechanisms, and refused to provide tangible records or “paper trails” by means of which their tabulations could be compared against voting practices affirmed by citizens themselves.
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Dean is a figure in whom both the reckless enthusiasms as well as the dashed hopes that presumably inevitably freight utopian technophilia condense with an especially illuminating ferocity. The enthusiasm generated for a time by what was widely described (perhaps without perfect justice for such a conventionally moderate American politician) as an “insurgent candidacy” arising out of the American Left was largely assimilated to befuddled rather nervous contemplations by mainstream media pundits of the role of digital networked media in particular in Dean’s campaign (and, from their perspective, the probably threateningly expanding role of digital networks in politics to come). And it is no surprise that when Dean’s campaign went on to evaporate in an embarrassing defeat in the 2004 Iowa caucuses the end of its narrative was likewise regularly assimilated through the figure of a “bursting bubble” to the kinds of irrationally exuberant hyperbole of the “dot.com” internet enthusiasms that preceded their own rather stunning failures at the turn of the millennium.
In his Iowa concession speech, Dean shouted to be heard over the enthusiastic voices of his supporters in a crowded room, not realizing that this crowd noise was filtered out for vast broadcast television and radio audiences, creating an impression for them of near hysteria as he cheered his supporters on above the din. What has been variously dubbed (now quite literally, as it happens, into any number of dance mixes, among other things) “the Dean Scream” or the “I Have a Scream Speech,” was then looped interminably over the twenty-four hour broadcast news cycle, kneaded into what had already been widely criticized as an unfair but by then effortlessly and so apparently irresistibly available mainstream narrative of Dean’s “immoderateness” and consequent “unelectability.”
And so, through the figure of Howard Dean, a narrative and argumentative frame arraying the distortive and dystopian machineries of elite broadcast media against the utopian “Netroots” democratization of social software becomes well nigh irresistible for technoprogressive media critics and enthusiasts.
That this frame arose specifically in the aftermath of Dean’s rather spectacular defeat (although Dean’s subsequent bid to be elected Chair of the Democratic National Committee, in February, 2005, which was likewise figured as an anti-establishment “insurgency” supported primarily by “Netroots” mobilization, was successful), should surely recommend some qualification at least to the optimism of its most eager advocates. Consider the extent to which corporate press releases from Diebold Election Systems -- now weighted down with suspicions in connection with the statistically curious results of the November 2004 American Presidential Election itself, in which they played, together with Dean, a significant role in the larger drama -- deployed comparably sunny technophilic stylings, dilating endlessly and cheerfully about the security, ease, and techno-enfranchisement facilitated by digitality, even as machines they developed eschewed open source, lacked reliable authentication mechanisms, and refused to provide tangible records or “paper trails” by means of which their tabulations could be compared against voting practices affirmed by citizens themselves.
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PVI. dKos as Figure
Consider, for a moment, the example of a single blog, the “Daily Kos.” "dKos" actually manages to exemplify (and symptomize) at once so many of the actual features, cultural practices, and best hopes of the wider "blogosphere" imagined as a radically democratizing force that I think it has come to function as a characteristic figure through which to think about social software in its emancipatory and radically democratic registers more generally.
Created in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Daily Kos is the most widely read and arguably the most influential American political blog at the time of this writing. The site presently attracts nearly half a million readers a day. Although Moulitsas was the creator and remains the proprietor of the blog, it is fair to say that he is one of countless collaborators in the ongoing development and ramification of the Daily Kos as a discursive space and online culture.
Quite a lot of the distinctive flavor and value of the Daily Kos as a community and meta-blogspace arose as a direct and, as it happens, unintended consequence of Moulitsas’ choice to implement dKos through recourse to a web application called “Scoop” in which the comments of readers who participate in the site are foregrounded more than is usually the case in typical blogging software.
Registered participants can create “Diaries” that function somewhat like stripped-down blogs within the blog. These texts are then ranked by other registered users of the site. If a Diary attracts enough positive attention it acquires the status of a “Recommended” text and is given a special prominence for a time (and since several Diaries can sometimes arrive on the scene each minute such prominence provides a chance at a wider readership that could never be assured them otherwise).
This conspicuously collaborative character of the dKos online culture extends to other aspects and activities of the site as well. The Daily Kos archives a host of permanent articles and essays, glossaries of terms, historical sketches, candidate profiles, talking points on issues of the day, tactical recommendations and the like, for example, all gathered in a wiki under the title of the “dKospedia,” an information resource to which registered users make the bulk of the contributions as well as editing this content for accuracy and clarity on an ongoing basis.
And in the 2004 Election Cycle, users of (both contributors to and readers of) the Daily Kos contributed approximately half a million dollars through the site and on the basis of its recommendations to various Democratic candidates. The sheer volume of money raised in this way, mostly via small contributions across the sprawling diffuse blog-coordinated network, as well as the strategic sophistication that directed its subsequent distribution still seem an ongoing provocation to established political authorities and received political assumptions.
Together with the use of social software to organize meetings, protests, activist campaigns, petitions, and the like, and to co-ordinate extraordinarily rapid responses to current events and mainstream media commentary, this aggregation of small campaign contributions to raise vast sums of money has come to be described as the mobilization of the “Netroots” (a play on the figure of “grassroots” to elicit the power of its participatory politics). No less important are the emerging forms of blog-facilitated muckraking journalism (for which the inevitable coinage “blograking” instantly arose to capture the practice), including the lightning-quick and viral pseudonymous diffusion of gossip, leaks, misinformation, protests, and whistle-blowing online, as well as emerging collaborative and aggregative alternatives to conventional editing, fact-checking, assessment, and reputation-formation.
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Created in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Daily Kos is the most widely read and arguably the most influential American political blog at the time of this writing. The site presently attracts nearly half a million readers a day. Although Moulitsas was the creator and remains the proprietor of the blog, it is fair to say that he is one of countless collaborators in the ongoing development and ramification of the Daily Kos as a discursive space and online culture.
Quite a lot of the distinctive flavor and value of the Daily Kos as a community and meta-blogspace arose as a direct and, as it happens, unintended consequence of Moulitsas’ choice to implement dKos through recourse to a web application called “Scoop” in which the comments of readers who participate in the site are foregrounded more than is usually the case in typical blogging software.
Registered participants can create “Diaries” that function somewhat like stripped-down blogs within the blog. These texts are then ranked by other registered users of the site. If a Diary attracts enough positive attention it acquires the status of a “Recommended” text and is given a special prominence for a time (and since several Diaries can sometimes arrive on the scene each minute such prominence provides a chance at a wider readership that could never be assured them otherwise).
This conspicuously collaborative character of the dKos online culture extends to other aspects and activities of the site as well. The Daily Kos archives a host of permanent articles and essays, glossaries of terms, historical sketches, candidate profiles, talking points on issues of the day, tactical recommendations and the like, for example, all gathered in a wiki under the title of the “dKospedia,” an information resource to which registered users make the bulk of the contributions as well as editing this content for accuracy and clarity on an ongoing basis.
And in the 2004 Election Cycle, users of (both contributors to and readers of) the Daily Kos contributed approximately half a million dollars through the site and on the basis of its recommendations to various Democratic candidates. The sheer volume of money raised in this way, mostly via small contributions across the sprawling diffuse blog-coordinated network, as well as the strategic sophistication that directed its subsequent distribution still seem an ongoing provocation to established political authorities and received political assumptions.
Together with the use of social software to organize meetings, protests, activist campaigns, petitions, and the like, and to co-ordinate extraordinarily rapid responses to current events and mainstream media commentary, this aggregation of small campaign contributions to raise vast sums of money has come to be described as the mobilization of the “Netroots” (a play on the figure of “grassroots” to elicit the power of its participatory politics). No less important are the emerging forms of blog-facilitated muckraking journalism (for which the inevitable coinage “blograking” instantly arose to capture the practice), including the lightning-quick and viral pseudonymous diffusion of gossip, leaks, misinformation, protests, and whistle-blowing online, as well as emerging collaborative and aggregative alternatives to conventional editing, fact-checking, assessment, and reputation-formation.
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PV. Trippi on Revolution
Listening in on a recitation of some of the above, a helpful friend of mine offered up the epigrammatic comment, "Blog Blah Blah." Knowing the humid hullabaloos that haloed the terms “cybserspace,” “digitality,” and “virtuality” among others in turn over the last decade or so is it any wonder that even openminded tech-savvy netizen-types might hesitate to commit their attentions uncritically, or at any rate unironically, to what appears to be the latest emanation of the American technological sublime? But, given the actual impacts over the last decade or so on countless actual human lives of computers, digital media, and even virtual reality (to the extent that video games, military training simulations, industrial computer-assisted-design applications, and the like constitute workaday virtualities), then, precisely to the contrary, why would anyone hesitate at all to take up “blogging” in full seriousness?
In his recent book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Joe Trippi juxtaposes the political cultures seemingly differently incubated by mass-media articulated primarily through the lens of national broadcast television and radio networks as against peer-to-peer networks supported by social software.
“As television transformed political campaigns,” writes Trippi, “people began viewing elections as no different than any other product someone was trying to sell them... So they channel surfed. They tuned out. When the networks call elections before voters have even been to the polls, when they turn our political system into just another TV show (and not a very good one at that...) all they do is encourage people to turn the channel.”
Given that Trippi will want to counterpose to this kind of pernicious passivity a more active democratic engagement he would associate with digital networked media practices, I think he might benefit to pause here to consider that the figures through which we articulate the phenomenological inhabitation of networked media often seem to register the same kind of “passivity”: either literally invoking a “surfing” of the web that connects explicitly to the “channel-surfing” he disdains, or invoking the notion of “browsing” the web via a software application like “Netscape” or “Mozilla Firefox” rather like a consumer wandering a mall.
Still, Trippi continues on rather elegiacally from there to point out that “[f]rom that seminal moment when I watched Robert Kennedy declare victory and then turn and walk toward his death in 1968, until now, the involvement of Americans in all levels of politics has fallen precipitously.”
His case here is borne out by a number of compelling statistics. There has been a “decline in the number of voters in the presidential election (...from 62.8 percent in 1960 to below 50 percent in recent years). The percentage of people who worked for a political party also plummeted, by about 42 percent in the past 30 years. The number who served on a committee for some local organization fell by 39 percent. Thirty-five percent fewer attended public meetings. Thirty-four percent fewer attended a political rally or speech.”
Against this, Trippi contrasts what he takes to be an extraordinary upwelling of political participation in the 2004 American Presidential Election cycle, a reinvigoration of grassroots organizing and small-contribution campaign fundraising practices that coincided in his view with the most recent proliferation of social software facilitated communication, fundraising, meeting, and organizational tools.
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In his recent book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Joe Trippi juxtaposes the political cultures seemingly differently incubated by mass-media articulated primarily through the lens of national broadcast television and radio networks as against peer-to-peer networks supported by social software.
“As television transformed political campaigns,” writes Trippi, “people began viewing elections as no different than any other product someone was trying to sell them... So they channel surfed. They tuned out. When the networks call elections before voters have even been to the polls, when they turn our political system into just another TV show (and not a very good one at that...) all they do is encourage people to turn the channel.”
Given that Trippi will want to counterpose to this kind of pernicious passivity a more active democratic engagement he would associate with digital networked media practices, I think he might benefit to pause here to consider that the figures through which we articulate the phenomenological inhabitation of networked media often seem to register the same kind of “passivity”: either literally invoking a “surfing” of the web that connects explicitly to the “channel-surfing” he disdains, or invoking the notion of “browsing” the web via a software application like “Netscape” or “Mozilla Firefox” rather like a consumer wandering a mall.
Still, Trippi continues on rather elegiacally from there to point out that “[f]rom that seminal moment when I watched Robert Kennedy declare victory and then turn and walk toward his death in 1968, until now, the involvement of Americans in all levels of politics has fallen precipitously.”
His case here is borne out by a number of compelling statistics. There has been a “decline in the number of voters in the presidential election (...from 62.8 percent in 1960 to below 50 percent in recent years). The percentage of people who worked for a political party also plummeted, by about 42 percent in the past 30 years. The number who served on a committee for some local organization fell by 39 percent. Thirty-five percent fewer attended public meetings. Thirty-four percent fewer attended a political rally or speech.”
Against this, Trippi contrasts what he takes to be an extraordinary upwelling of political participation in the 2004 American Presidential Election cycle, a reinvigoration of grassroots organizing and small-contribution campaign fundraising practices that coincided in his view with the most recent proliferation of social software facilitated communication, fundraising, meeting, and organizational tools.
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PIV. Arendt on Revolution
In the concluding chapter of her book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt said of the twentieth century that “no historian will ever be able to tell the tale of our century without stringing it ‘on the thread of revolutions.’” But she went on to insist that there is a second thread, its twin, complement, or subversion, that demands telling as well, concerning “the regular emergence, during the course of revolution, of a new form of government that resembled Jefferson’s ward system and seemed to repeat, under no matter what circumstances, the revolutionary societies and municipal councils which had spread all over France in 1789.”
There is “no tradition, either revolutionary or pre-revolutionary,” she wrote, that “can be called to account for the regular emergence and re-emergence of” what she calls “the council system ever since the French Revolution.” And yet she sketches a tale of the “appearance[s] of these organs of action and germs of a new state” in easy strokes:
This is a story that resonates for me with the claims of the inveterately hopeful technoprogressive social software enthusiasts, both in its appealing if romantic discernment of and hopes for a deeper and more direct democracy mobilized from an occasion of social destabilization (although for the technophiles the occasion arises particularly from congenial conjunctions of technological developments), as well as in a susceptibility it shares with technoprogressives to degenerate into a rather naïve kind of political anarchism.
The decisively more direct democratic councils and associations and structures of governance that seem to emerge inevitably “out of the organizational impulses of the people themselves” in the revolutionary situation for Arendt, are “never thought of... as germs for a new form of government,” for the “professional revolutionaries” of the avant-garde but are “regarded... as mere instruments to be dispensed with once the revolution came to an end.” It is for this reason that her story of an episodic re-emergence of “the council system” in moments of revolutionary upheaval and its apparently inevitable supersession in the aftermath of revolution by the re-imposition of less democratic modes of governance is for Arendt finally such “a strange and sad story,” and constitutes what she calls “The Lost Treasure [of]... [t]he Revolutionary Tradition.”
And while sometimes, certainly, the differences between word and world that distinguish the furniture from the poetry of social software bespeak little more than a considerable bamboozlement by hype on the part of its enthusiasts, surely sometimes it testifies likewise to comparable betrayals, corruptions, failures of imagination or of nerve, and so traces a trail of “buried treasure” in the portentious, epochal, but always somehow still terribly disappointing succession of technological “revolutions” that preoccupy them as well.
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There is “no tradition, either revolutionary or pre-revolutionary,” she wrote, that “can be called to account for the regular emergence and re-emergence of” what she calls “the council system ever since the French Revolution.” And yet she sketches a tale of the “appearance[s] of these organs of action and germs of a new state” in easy strokes:
[T]he year 1870, when the French capital under siege by the Prussian army ‘spontaneously reorganized itself into a miniature federal body,’ which formed the nucleus for the Parisian Commune government in the spring of 1871; the year 1905, when the wave of spontaneous strikes in Russia suddenly developed a political leadership of its own, outside all revolutionary parties and groups, and the workers in the factories organized themselves into councils, soviets, for the purpose of representative self-government; the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia, when ‘despite different political tendencies among the Russian workers, the organization itself, that is the soviet, was not even subject to discussion’; the years 1918 and 1919 in Germany, when, after the defeat of the army, soldiers and workers in open rebellion constituted themselves into Arbeiter- und Soldatenrate, demanding, in Berlin, that this Ratesystem become the foundation stone of the new German constitution, and establishing together with the Bohemians of the coffee houses, in Munich in the spring of 1919, the short-lived Bavarian Raterepublik; the last date, finally... the autumn of 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution from its very beginning produced the council system anew in Budapest, from which it spread all over the country ‘with incredible rapidity.’
This is a story that resonates for me with the claims of the inveterately hopeful technoprogressive social software enthusiasts, both in its appealing if romantic discernment of and hopes for a deeper and more direct democracy mobilized from an occasion of social destabilization (although for the technophiles the occasion arises particularly from congenial conjunctions of technological developments), as well as in a susceptibility it shares with technoprogressives to degenerate into a rather naïve kind of political anarchism.
The decisively more direct democratic councils and associations and structures of governance that seem to emerge inevitably “out of the organizational impulses of the people themselves” in the revolutionary situation for Arendt, are “never thought of... as germs for a new form of government,” for the “professional revolutionaries” of the avant-garde but are “regarded... as mere instruments to be dispensed with once the revolution came to an end.” It is for this reason that her story of an episodic re-emergence of “the council system” in moments of revolutionary upheaval and its apparently inevitable supersession in the aftermath of revolution by the re-imposition of less democratic modes of governance is for Arendt finally such “a strange and sad story,” and constitutes what she calls “The Lost Treasure [of]... [t]he Revolutionary Tradition.”
And while sometimes, certainly, the differences between word and world that distinguish the furniture from the poetry of social software bespeak little more than a considerable bamboozlement by hype on the part of its enthusiasts, surely sometimes it testifies likewise to comparable betrayals, corruptions, failures of imagination or of nerve, and so traces a trail of “buried treasure” in the portentious, epochal, but always somehow still terribly disappointing succession of technological “revolutions” that preoccupy them as well.
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PIII. Social Software Sublime
Technophiles routinely and notoriously invest their tools with superlative and even spiritual significance, just as technocrats notoriously confuse the intractable political quandaries of reconciling diverse human aspirations with more straightforward engineering problems. It is not always easy to disentangle the powerful and weird overlapping registers in which what appear at first to be primarily technical terms manage to exert their actual cultural significance and force.
For example, “social software” is a general term that has relatively recently assumed prominence as a description of a whole constellation of network applications that facilitate and support collaboration and conversation among their users.
Some of these, like bulletin boards, discussion lists, chatrooms and other online fora, have been around for some time (in the lightning-flash fast-forward dog-year reckoning of web time). Others are rather newer.
There is social networking software that facilitates job searches, helps users make professional contacts, maintains connections among friends and acquaintances, provides matches for more selective dating, or opportunities to find likely sexual partners –- and who is to say how long the terms with which we associate these applications will retain any currency, “LinkedIn,” “Tribe,” “Friendster,” “Orkut,” among many others...
There are wikis, which are sites to which users can publish their own content as they see fit, but also edit the content they find there (often only to find their own edits quickly superseded by fresh edits by others). And there are bookmarking applications in which users variously annotate, tag, or signal special interest in online materials, offer up lists of enthusiasms, associations, rankings, taxonomies, and from aggregations of which information sometimes emerge curiously powerful and novel organizations of information.
There are blogs, of course (about which I will have still more to say later), and there is, after all, the “Web” itself, the cyberspatial sprawl, that “consensual hallucination” or hallucination of consent we are all weaving, weaving around, woven into all at once.
And there has been, of course, a comparable host of exhilarated claims made along a long trajectory of hype and hope from technophiles and “digirati” through waves of recent decades of computer and media developments. It is interesting to notice in this connection the extent to which one of the best and most influential histories of social software available so far, Christopher Allen’s “Tracing the Evolution of Social Software” is a tale that will be very familiar in many of its own landmarks, figures, and textual canon to scholars of computation and especially the “internet” already, a tale in which the protagonists are Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945) and “memex” device, Doug Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect” (1962), J.C.R. Licklider’s “The Computer as a Communication Device” (1968) and ARPANET, through various incarnations of “Groupware,” to Ted Nelson and K. Eric Drexler’s Hypertext and “Xanadu.”
While there is no question that there really is something breathtaking about the pace and churn with which new social software applications arrive on the scene, solicit hectic experimentation, and then combine and sublime away into new forms, this does not seem to me to be enough to account for the pre-storm ozone reek of anticipation in the air, at once weirdly indefinite but definitely palpable, whenever handwaving enthusiasts really get going about “social software.” The revolutionaries say “software,” but their eyes seem to have something like liberty, emancipation, or democracy (along with stars) in them.
Consider further a few of the terms that persistently re-appear in discussions of emerging digital networked information and communication technologies, and especially in discussions of social software: end-to-end, peer-to-peer, and open source.
As I will have occasion to discuss at greater length in Chapter Two, the end-to-end principle remarks that there is usually a crucial tradeoff between optimizing a network to perform any particular function or facilitate the working of any particular application as against optimizing a network to accommodate as many functions as possible. To the extent that what is wanted is a network that will not be rendered quickly obsolete in the face of ongoing innovation, the principle encourages the design of “dumb networks” in which intelligence and functionality are pushed off to the periphery or the terminals of the network as much as possible. The internet as a “network of networks” has incarnated this principle across its many layers, and has readily accommodated wave after wave of experimentalism, tinkering, attack, and reinvention as a result.
End-to-end (e2e) bears more than a family resemblance to another technical phrase, peer-to-peer. That term acquired its currency partly as a repudiation of the uncharacteristically hierarchical client/server model that arose in the era of the internet’s explosive growth from 1994-2000, but defines a network design ethos that long predates its present popularity. “Peer-to-peer” describes systems (and the collaborative projects they facilitate) that take advantage of radically decentralized resources under conditions of variable network connectivity.
A third term, open-source, describes software whose source code is freely available for scrutiny, modification, and distribution by its users.
There are powerfully prophetic deployments available for terms like “peer-to-peer,” “open source,” and the “end-to-end principle” that one will sometimes hear in the language of technology enthusiasts who are struggling to convey their sense that digital networked information and communication technologies might have profoundly emancipatory uses and mobilize revolutionary energies. These radical discourses aren’t really always so easy to square with the otherwise more flat-footed deployments of these terms in their strictly technical senses.
How can we take a sensible measure of the distance between these deployments?
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For example, “social software” is a general term that has relatively recently assumed prominence as a description of a whole constellation of network applications that facilitate and support collaboration and conversation among their users.
Some of these, like bulletin boards, discussion lists, chatrooms and other online fora, have been around for some time (in the lightning-flash fast-forward dog-year reckoning of web time). Others are rather newer.
There is social networking software that facilitates job searches, helps users make professional contacts, maintains connections among friends and acquaintances, provides matches for more selective dating, or opportunities to find likely sexual partners –- and who is to say how long the terms with which we associate these applications will retain any currency, “LinkedIn,” “Tribe,” “Friendster,” “Orkut,” among many others...
There are wikis, which are sites to which users can publish their own content as they see fit, but also edit the content they find there (often only to find their own edits quickly superseded by fresh edits by others). And there are bookmarking applications in which users variously annotate, tag, or signal special interest in online materials, offer up lists of enthusiasms, associations, rankings, taxonomies, and from aggregations of which information sometimes emerge curiously powerful and novel organizations of information.
There are blogs, of course (about which I will have still more to say later), and there is, after all, the “Web” itself, the cyberspatial sprawl, that “consensual hallucination” or hallucination of consent we are all weaving, weaving around, woven into all at once.
And there has been, of course, a comparable host of exhilarated claims made along a long trajectory of hype and hope from technophiles and “digirati” through waves of recent decades of computer and media developments. It is interesting to notice in this connection the extent to which one of the best and most influential histories of social software available so far, Christopher Allen’s “Tracing the Evolution of Social Software” is a tale that will be very familiar in many of its own landmarks, figures, and textual canon to scholars of computation and especially the “internet” already, a tale in which the protagonists are Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945) and “memex” device, Doug Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect” (1962), J.C.R. Licklider’s “The Computer as a Communication Device” (1968) and ARPANET, through various incarnations of “Groupware,” to Ted Nelson and K. Eric Drexler’s Hypertext and “Xanadu.”
While there is no question that there really is something breathtaking about the pace and churn with which new social software applications arrive on the scene, solicit hectic experimentation, and then combine and sublime away into new forms, this does not seem to me to be enough to account for the pre-storm ozone reek of anticipation in the air, at once weirdly indefinite but definitely palpable, whenever handwaving enthusiasts really get going about “social software.” The revolutionaries say “software,” but their eyes seem to have something like liberty, emancipation, or democracy (along with stars) in them.
Consider further a few of the terms that persistently re-appear in discussions of emerging digital networked information and communication technologies, and especially in discussions of social software: end-to-end, peer-to-peer, and open source.
As I will have occasion to discuss at greater length in Chapter Two, the end-to-end principle remarks that there is usually a crucial tradeoff between optimizing a network to perform any particular function or facilitate the working of any particular application as against optimizing a network to accommodate as many functions as possible. To the extent that what is wanted is a network that will not be rendered quickly obsolete in the face of ongoing innovation, the principle encourages the design of “dumb networks” in which intelligence and functionality are pushed off to the periphery or the terminals of the network as much as possible. The internet as a “network of networks” has incarnated this principle across its many layers, and has readily accommodated wave after wave of experimentalism, tinkering, attack, and reinvention as a result.
End-to-end (e2e) bears more than a family resemblance to another technical phrase, peer-to-peer. That term acquired its currency partly as a repudiation of the uncharacteristically hierarchical client/server model that arose in the era of the internet’s explosive growth from 1994-2000, but defines a network design ethos that long predates its present popularity. “Peer-to-peer” describes systems (and the collaborative projects they facilitate) that take advantage of radically decentralized resources under conditions of variable network connectivity.
A third term, open-source, describes software whose source code is freely available for scrutiny, modification, and distribution by its users.
There are powerfully prophetic deployments available for terms like “peer-to-peer,” “open source,” and the “end-to-end principle” that one will sometimes hear in the language of technology enthusiasts who are struggling to convey their sense that digital networked information and communication technologies might have profoundly emancipatory uses and mobilize revolutionary energies. These radical discourses aren’t really always so easy to square with the otherwise more flat-footed deployments of these terms in their strictly technical senses.
How can we take a sensible measure of the distance between these deployments?
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PII. Social Architectures
Many bloggers make recourse to tools and software packages that are widely and often freely available online, and which are similar but not identical to one another in the constellation of features they provide. Even minute differences, though, in the ease with which a popular ready-made software package might facilitate the inclusion of images or the provision of ways for readers to comment on blog-posts will have a significant impact on actual blogging practices on the ground and so on the generic development of the form.
danah boyd, for example, has recently pointed to the ways in which discursive communities that have coalesced around the use of “LiveJournal” software are often discernibly different from those of the wider “blogosphere” with which it tends to be identified.
She suggests that part of the reason that support groups and communities celebrating marginalized enthusiasms might have drifted more into the orbit of LiveJournal than to alternate packages like, say, the likewise popular “Blogger” or “Movable Type,” is that it provides an architecture that very readily facilitates control over the extent to which texts “publicly” circulate, providing for publication to a wide range of more intimate reading publics, consisting only of family members, for instance, or just friends, or other broader but still restrictive affiliations.
boyd’s discussion registered the concerns of some users of LiveJournal that valuable cultural and personal prosthetic practices mediated through the software might be undermined or even altogether lost in the aftermath of LiveJournal’s purchase by a new company whose sensitivity to these issues was imperfectly known.
This is a story that nicely reverberates with many of the preoccupations of this dissertation at once, because it highlights so many of the ways in which digital networked publication practices and the social software and media technologies that facilitate them are palpably reconstituting the lived demarcation of public from private life in this historical moment. Practices of collaboration facilitated by social software (like blogs) are not just reshaping the everyday experiences and expectations and values that freight our sense of the “private” and the “public,” but they are mobilizing as well a whole set of fraught discursive quandaries around the ongoing “privatized” provision of “public” goods.
You know, I imagine a very substantial proportion of readers a moment ago felt a considerable sinking feeling at finding such an elementary definition and then somewhat belabored description of blogging appearing so early on (or at all) in this essay. Some, indeed, may scarcely have been able to resist heaving a histrionic sigh at the very sight of it.
These sufferers likely cleave more or less neatly into a few clearly discriminable camps: First, there would be those for whom blogs are altogether too newfangled and strange and likely-as-not too weighted down with technophilic hype to deserve much in the way of serious scholarly attention in the first place. Second, there will have been those familiar enough with blogs and comparable web applications to know that the profusion and evanescence of the forms they are taking threatens to render any delineation of such terms nearly meaningless when all is said and done anyway. And finally there would be those for whom blogs are in any case yesterday’s news, already long superseded by newer tools and the always inevitably more arresting newer cultural formations that are incubating them now and will surely accommodate them later.
Although it is a commonplace to hear technological development described as though it were monolithically “progressing,” “accelerating,” “emerging,” “converging,” or what have you, the truth is that the prosthetic practices in which we invent, employ, and otherwise variously take up and make sense of our tools and techniques are of course unutterably multiform. And so it will always be difficult to pitch technocritical discourse at the right level of generality, to the right expectation of familiarity, in the right moment within a given developmental arc to render its interventions useful to more than very specialized audiences.
Now, according to Merriam-Webster, visitors to their online dictionary looked up the term “blog” more than any other word in 2004, and the American Dialect Society selected the term “blog” as their own “word of the year” at the same time as well. That the American Dialect Society chose “metrosexual” as the prior year’s word with comparable fanfare delivers us forcefully into the dilemma at hand. Clearly, something is afoot in the aborning “blogosphere” but just what is it? and does it matter? and if it does, how much? and how on earth are we to know? and just who is best positioned to tell us so? Or, to ask these questions via another phrase from the archive whose vexed overdeterminations perfectly exemplify the dilemmas at hand, “where’s the beef”?
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danah boyd, for example, has recently pointed to the ways in which discursive communities that have coalesced around the use of “LiveJournal” software are often discernibly different from those of the wider “blogosphere” with which it tends to be identified.
She suggests that part of the reason that support groups and communities celebrating marginalized enthusiasms might have drifted more into the orbit of LiveJournal than to alternate packages like, say, the likewise popular “Blogger” or “Movable Type,” is that it provides an architecture that very readily facilitates control over the extent to which texts “publicly” circulate, providing for publication to a wide range of more intimate reading publics, consisting only of family members, for instance, or just friends, or other broader but still restrictive affiliations.
boyd’s discussion registered the concerns of some users of LiveJournal that valuable cultural and personal prosthetic practices mediated through the software might be undermined or even altogether lost in the aftermath of LiveJournal’s purchase by a new company whose sensitivity to these issues was imperfectly known.
This is a story that nicely reverberates with many of the preoccupations of this dissertation at once, because it highlights so many of the ways in which digital networked publication practices and the social software and media technologies that facilitate them are palpably reconstituting the lived demarcation of public from private life in this historical moment. Practices of collaboration facilitated by social software (like blogs) are not just reshaping the everyday experiences and expectations and values that freight our sense of the “private” and the “public,” but they are mobilizing as well a whole set of fraught discursive quandaries around the ongoing “privatized” provision of “public” goods.
You know, I imagine a very substantial proportion of readers a moment ago felt a considerable sinking feeling at finding such an elementary definition and then somewhat belabored description of blogging appearing so early on (or at all) in this essay. Some, indeed, may scarcely have been able to resist heaving a histrionic sigh at the very sight of it.
These sufferers likely cleave more or less neatly into a few clearly discriminable camps: First, there would be those for whom blogs are altogether too newfangled and strange and likely-as-not too weighted down with technophilic hype to deserve much in the way of serious scholarly attention in the first place. Second, there will have been those familiar enough with blogs and comparable web applications to know that the profusion and evanescence of the forms they are taking threatens to render any delineation of such terms nearly meaningless when all is said and done anyway. And finally there would be those for whom blogs are in any case yesterday’s news, already long superseded by newer tools and the always inevitably more arresting newer cultural formations that are incubating them now and will surely accommodate them later.
Although it is a commonplace to hear technological development described as though it were monolithically “progressing,” “accelerating,” “emerging,” “converging,” or what have you, the truth is that the prosthetic practices in which we invent, employ, and otherwise variously take up and make sense of our tools and techniques are of course unutterably multiform. And so it will always be difficult to pitch technocritical discourse at the right level of generality, to the right expectation of familiarity, in the right moment within a given developmental arc to render its interventions useful to more than very specialized audiences.
Now, according to Merriam-Webster, visitors to their online dictionary looked up the term “blog” more than any other word in 2004, and the American Dialect Society selected the term “blog” as their own “word of the year” at the same time as well. That the American Dialect Society chose “metrosexual” as the prior year’s word with comparable fanfare delivers us forcefully into the dilemma at hand. Clearly, something is afoot in the aborning “blogosphere” but just what is it? and does it matter? and if it does, how much? and how on earth are we to know? and just who is best positioned to tell us so? Or, to ask these questions via another phrase from the archive whose vexed overdeterminations perfectly exemplify the dilemmas at hand, “where’s the beef”?
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PI. Dissing Blogging
Soon after I finished my initial reading and research for my dissertation and actually set out to physically write the thing, I simultaneously began to write on many of the same topics that preoccupy me here in various alternative forms online as well.
For one thing, and most significantly I suppose, I began to publish a personal blog in which I discuss technocultural and technoethical questions, among other things, and especially political quandaries that democratic and otherwise progressive temperaments might discern in emerging technological developments.
I say that I publish this technocriticism “among other things” in my blogging and I don’t want the “other things” conjured up in that little aside to vanish but on the contrary to dwell on them a moment.
Since this is a blog I’m talking about and not, say, a dissertation, it practically goes without saying that the discussions of technology and democracy I engage in there are mulched in together with all sorts of random commentary and editorializing about current events, flashes of momentary inspiration that lack much in the way of rigorous development or support, joking asides, links to other works online that seem important from moment to moment, sprawling and painstakingly researched discourses on various topics that drift within the field of my personal interest or what I take to be my special expertise, pregnant quotations, straightforward snark, anecdotes from my personal life, and so on. While it is by no means true that all blogs exhibit all of the idiosyncrasies of my own, these are all certainly familiar forms of the spectacle that blogging is making of itself at the moment.
The term “blog,” I probably should have already mentioned by now, is a truncation of “web-log” and refers to a regularly updated online publication the entries to which are almost always listed in chronological order, and which usually features the most recent entries most prominently.
Blogs are like dogs in that a stunning variety of beasts will pass for them. But there is at least a muzzy default morphology which many blogs will broadly approximate, consisting of a couple of columns of text or so over which a stationary masthead hovers and down which readers scroll along as they read. In these, the main column of text will tend to contain the sequential entries to the blog itself, often bristling with clickable links to other texts with which each entry is in conversation, flanked by columns containing other content, sometimes offering up a sketch of personal information about the blogger, sometimes providing space for ad copy in a usually quixotic effort at making the blog an even marginally remunerative effort, and almost inevitably containing a “blogroll” (which amounts importantly to advertising as well) consisting of a listing of links to other blogs, authors, and pieces online which each blogger recommends to the attention of their readers.
Formally and temperamentally, blogs run the gamut from the torrid exuberance of ranting pamphleteers to the staid professionalism of a paper of record. Most often, for now at least, blogs tend to resemble the entries in a personal journal or the archive of a journalist’s regularly published columns. But online publications that will be considered blogs can already exhibit an extraordinary and still proliferating range of formal characteristics in fact, and can feature any of the available varieties of media that have lately been vacuumed into ongoing digital convergence, written texts, static and moving visual images, audio, content that solicits editing, annotation, interaction, collaboration, exploration, and even outright immersion in different measures.
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For one thing, and most significantly I suppose, I began to publish a personal blog in which I discuss technocultural and technoethical questions, among other things, and especially political quandaries that democratic and otherwise progressive temperaments might discern in emerging technological developments.
I say that I publish this technocriticism “among other things” in my blogging and I don’t want the “other things” conjured up in that little aside to vanish but on the contrary to dwell on them a moment.
Since this is a blog I’m talking about and not, say, a dissertation, it practically goes without saying that the discussions of technology and democracy I engage in there are mulched in together with all sorts of random commentary and editorializing about current events, flashes of momentary inspiration that lack much in the way of rigorous development or support, joking asides, links to other works online that seem important from moment to moment, sprawling and painstakingly researched discourses on various topics that drift within the field of my personal interest or what I take to be my special expertise, pregnant quotations, straightforward snark, anecdotes from my personal life, and so on. While it is by no means true that all blogs exhibit all of the idiosyncrasies of my own, these are all certainly familiar forms of the spectacle that blogging is making of itself at the moment.
The term “blog,” I probably should have already mentioned by now, is a truncation of “web-log” and refers to a regularly updated online publication the entries to which are almost always listed in chronological order, and which usually features the most recent entries most prominently.
Blogs are like dogs in that a stunning variety of beasts will pass for them. But there is at least a muzzy default morphology which many blogs will broadly approximate, consisting of a couple of columns of text or so over which a stationary masthead hovers and down which readers scroll along as they read. In these, the main column of text will tend to contain the sequential entries to the blog itself, often bristling with clickable links to other texts with which each entry is in conversation, flanked by columns containing other content, sometimes offering up a sketch of personal information about the blogger, sometimes providing space for ad copy in a usually quixotic effort at making the blog an even marginally remunerative effort, and almost inevitably containing a “blogroll” (which amounts importantly to advertising as well) consisting of a listing of links to other blogs, authors, and pieces online which each blogger recommends to the attention of their readers.
Formally and temperamentally, blogs run the gamut from the torrid exuberance of ranting pamphleteers to the staid professionalism of a paper of record. Most often, for now at least, blogs tend to resemble the entries in a personal journal or the archive of a journalist’s regularly published columns. But online publications that will be considered blogs can already exhibit an extraordinary and still proliferating range of formal characteristics in fact, and can feature any of the available varieties of media that have lately been vacuumed into ongoing digital convergence, written texts, static and moving visual images, audio, content that solicits editing, annotation, interaction, collaboration, exploration, and even outright immersion in different measures.
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Friday, April 01, 2005
"A Dose of the New Medical Reality"
My latest Progressive Futures column is up over at BH. My own initial title for the piece was a more academic and anemic "Medicine from Recovery to Recreation." Regular readers will recognize sections of the piece from the blog, actually, since I poked and pasted bits of various responses to the Schiavo circus over the last week, like a baker nudging dough into a loaf, to get the column together. Let me know if you like or dislike it.
Experimental Subjects in the Next Revolution: Conjoining Progress, Precaution, and Peer-to-Peer
According to a piece in Medical News Today, John Harris, a Professor of Bioethics at the Institute of Medicine, Law and Bioethics at the University of Manchester, has argued (in “Scientific Research is a Moral Duty,” Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005 31: pp. 242-248) that the public actually has at the very least a moral obligation to participate in medical and scientific research.
In general, I consider Harris to be among the most usefully provocative and clarifying bioethicists in the field, but I am a bit perplexed by the argument ascribed to him here.
And so, in this brief essaylet I want first to explain what I find troubling in the argument here, then to examine what seems to me its connection to certain analogous arguments one sometimes hears technophiles make in respect to the so-called Precautionary Principle, and then finally to propose an alternate peer-to-peer frame which seems to eliminate altogether any reason to make such arguments in the first place.
Harris’ argument, as it is reconstructed in the Medical News piece at any rate, is that since “[e]veryone in society stands to benefit from research, and indeed has already benefited... it should be economically, politically, and personally supported.”
Medical research has “almost universally been treated with suspicion and even hostility” among those who regulate it. But “[w]hile history has proved that suspicion of doctors and biomedical research is well founded,” the article continues to paraphrase, “this does not mean that research is guilty until proven innocent.” Harris is then quoted as saying: "Vigilance against wrongdoing is one thing; the inability to identify wrongdoing, with the result that the good is frustrated and harm caused is quite another."
Of course this is true, but it would appear that innocence is attaching in Harris' formulation disproportionately on precisely the institutions and practices being regulated to prevent abuses on the basis of suspicions that everyone presumably admits are “well-founded.”
It makes little sense in my view to ascribe hostility and irrational suspicion to regulators whose job it is, and for good reason, to be skeptical and suspicious. The attitude expressed here seems to me curiously complementary to the hostility of many technophiles to the Precautionary Principle which advocates the conspicuously sensible ideas that:
Technophiles who value speedier technological development in the expectation that it will deliver sooner goods of incomparable value, sometimes like to imply that advocates of Precaution are indifferent to the risks that often inhere in refraining to act, or assess actual risks unnecessarily stringently, or exhibit a kind of blanket hostility to the attainments of medical-industrial technocultures on which they themselves depend hypocritically for their own standards of living.
While this is no doubt true of some advocates of Precaution –- and partisans on both sides can of course always find photogenic specimens to trot out in the support of their views -– it ignores the extent to which the Precautionary Principle was introduced precisely in response to damaging corporate-friendly government or self-sponsored research that selectively framed and published its results, and in response to the deployment of impossibly high standards of certainty to create the false impression that widely held, well-founded suspicions and concerns were in fact too controversial to provide a justification for regulation.
Critics of Precaution also tend to ignore that many of the most influential formulations of the Precautionary Principle (which has no definitive or canonical expression) confine their attention to cases of likely nonreversible harm to the health of individuals or to environmental harms that are likely to impose remediation costs higher than the benefits they generate.
Few formulations of the Principle are in fact oblivious to the ineradicable dimension of risk that inheres in all human conduct, including decisions to refrain from action. And while I will grant that it has not yet often been mobilized in arguments of this kind, the Precautionary Principle would seem to me to impel the development and deployment of emerging technologies and techniques to more effectively address global harms, malnutrition and ill-health, certain existential risks that have not hitherto been susceptible of effective response (for example, a defense against asteroid impacts, or a global warning system to inform vulnerable populations of tsunamis and the like).
I have argued that the Precautionary Principle is (or certainly can and should be) infinitely far from the irrationalist celebration of stagnation and hostility to civilization technophiles sometimes seem to want to paint it as. It is, on the contrary, a democratizing deliberative framework for development, at once impelling a fairer distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technological development onto all of its stakeholders, while likewise enlisting the wider collaboration of these stakeholders in the actual process of research and the assessment of its results.
Precaution is not then a repudiation of progress, but the insistence of social democrats that progress, as we all now know, requires both the development of more powerful technologies and the wider empowerment of people through recourse to these technologies. Without both it is never appropriate to speak of a developmental outcome as progressive in the first place.
The force of Harris’ argument depends on his assumption that “[e]veryone in society stands to benefit from research, and indeed has already benefited.” But this is surely contradicted by his own recognition that worries about abuses are “well-founded.” Clearly, for one thing, the victims of such abuses are not straightforward beneficiaries of research in the ways that non-victims are.
This seems rather analogous to the argument of some opponents of Precaution who in celebrating the long-term benefits of development they themselves enjoy often elide the reality of the victims of development over the developmental spans in which they actually lived.
It is quite difficult to imagine that Harris would rephrase his point to suggest that people have a moral obligation to participate in risky research just to ensure that corporations profit more and more swiftly than they otherwise would, whether or not the people taking on these risks benefit themselves. But I want to know precisely why the obligation he proposes would not amount to this more pernicious demand in actual practice.
Now, while he does propose that people have an “obligation” to participate in research for the common good, even when this imposes risks and harms to their own well-being that might not otherwise seem compelling, Harris is thankfully not actually advocating that this moral obligation likewise justifies any kind of legal compulsion to so participate.
But he frankly nudges uncomfortably close to doing precisely that.
According to the Medical News article, Harris “contends that compulsion is, in principle, justifiable, and in certain circumstances, may be justified. And he suggests that a change to the Declaration of Helsinki, which sets out the ethical grounds for research, is warranted.”
In making his case, the article continues on, “Professor Harris points out that other activities in society, such as vaccination the wearing of seatbelts, and jury service, require the loss of personal autonomy for the public good.”
It is not exactly a matter of indifference that in each of the examples offered up here, an arguably rather negligible loss of autonomy corresponds not only to public goods but discernible benefits to the individual herself. Compelling individuals to participate in risky medical research might quite evidently impose incomparable costs without anything like comparable benefits.
Harris concludes his case in a moral register that is much less problematic: "The argument concerning the obligation to participate in research should be compelling for anyone who believes there is a moral obligation to help others, and/or a moral obligation to be just and do one's share. Little can be said to those whose morality is so impoverished that they do not accept either of these two obligations."
This seems to me an uncontroversial claim, but I sense in it a kind of frustration and even resignation that helps account for why Harris might hesitate to confine his argument to the mobilization of nonbinding moral injunctions.
I think Harris would be altogether wrong to succumb even slightly to the lure of compulsion as a way to secure the benefits of medical research (about which I happen to agree with him entirely). And I think it would be wrong for him mischaracterize as hostile or irrational the reasonable expectations of harm and abuse that both inspire the regulation of research and the hesitancy of many individuals to participate in some forms of it, as a way of justifying such compulsion.
But, frankly, I also think he is wrong to despair that beneficial research might not be undertaken in the absence of moral injunction or legal compulsion in the first place.
By way of a conclusion, permit me to sketch an altogether different (and, if I can be forgiven this, rather utopian) sense of the disposition of things.
Although it is difficult to descry such a thing in the midst of American militarism and fundamentalisms (of both the market and theological varieties), I am inclined to believe that the networked civilizations of the developed and developing world are well on their way to finding themselves in a quite self-conscious global project to empower morphological freedom and ameliorate (and to the extent possible even eliminate) nondiscretionary suffering and death. The science seems too proximate and the benefits too palpable for many to resist for long.
However well we fund and regulate medical and other scientific research to these ends, however, it remains true that the effects of therapeutic and enhancement procedures on particular individuals, in unpredictable combinations, and over the various longer time-scales involved are simply impossible to anticipate as well as anyone would like.
This has the consequence that every citizen in the democratizing world should be regarded as not only a legal subject but an "Experimental Subject" as well.
Experimental Subjects are bearers not only of the usual bundle of rights legal citizen-subjects have properly come to expect in social democracies (and which certainly should include at least basic healthcare provision), but should likewise be bearers of a “Stakeholder Grant” providing them the means to participate -- in as competent, informed, accountable, and consensual a way as possible –- in experimental therapeutic and enhancement medical procedures as well.
Unlike Harris, who seems to want to impel or even compel individuals to participate in medical research for the public good, I would argue that we should recognize the extent to which everybody is already participating in such research, as consumers in a vast globally distributed long-term experiment in combination therapy.
It seems to me that as Experimental Subjects in the global medical-industrial complex we all of us already incarnate indispensable data points in what amounts to a vast peer-to-peer project to advance medical and scientific research.
What I propose is simply that we should all actually recognize our indispensability, recognize the literally revolutionary force of this insight, and then demand to be paid for the privilege of so participating.
I would also propose that since we are all expected to relinquish quite a bit of traditional control over the circulation of personal information about the effects of our ongoing participation in this global experimental culture, we should not only demand payment but likewise demand that these results be distributed absolutely freely and transparently to encourage thereby the kind of innovation and accountability that best ensures that the costs and harms we undertake will be minimized and the benefits we enable available to all (including ourselves).
Since Harris suggests himself that “[f]inancial incentives to participate in research are fully justified and preferable to compulsion,” I hope he would be sympathetic to this viewpoint. My only cautionary note in joining with Harris in such a recommendation is to insist that the mode of financial incentivization that seems to me most likely to bear fruit would be one conjoined to a democratizing peer-to-peer model of research, rather than any of the customary market apologist models which we all well know by now would too likely devolve soon enough into the usual demand of “your money or your life.”
In general, I consider Harris to be among the most usefully provocative and clarifying bioethicists in the field, but I am a bit perplexed by the argument ascribed to him here.
And so, in this brief essaylet I want first to explain what I find troubling in the argument here, then to examine what seems to me its connection to certain analogous arguments one sometimes hears technophiles make in respect to the so-called Precautionary Principle, and then finally to propose an alternate peer-to-peer frame which seems to eliminate altogether any reason to make such arguments in the first place.
Harris’ argument, as it is reconstructed in the Medical News piece at any rate, is that since “[e]veryone in society stands to benefit from research, and indeed has already benefited... it should be economically, politically, and personally supported.”
Medical research has “almost universally been treated with suspicion and even hostility” among those who regulate it. But “[w]hile history has proved that suspicion of doctors and biomedical research is well founded,” the article continues to paraphrase, “this does not mean that research is guilty until proven innocent.” Harris is then quoted as saying: "Vigilance against wrongdoing is one thing; the inability to identify wrongdoing, with the result that the good is frustrated and harm caused is quite another."
Of course this is true, but it would appear that innocence is attaching in Harris' formulation disproportionately on precisely the institutions and practices being regulated to prevent abuses on the basis of suspicions that everyone presumably admits are “well-founded.”
It makes little sense in my view to ascribe hostility and irrational suspicion to regulators whose job it is, and for good reason, to be skeptical and suspicious. The attitude expressed here seems to me curiously complementary to the hostility of many technophiles to the Precautionary Principle which advocates the conspicuously sensible ideas that:
[1] We should always be cautious in the face of possible harm;
[2] As assessments of risk and harm grow more severe according to the consensus of relevant science, the burden of their justification rightly falls ever more conspicuously onto those who propose either to impose them or to refrain from ameliorating them; and
[3] The processes through which these justifications and their assessments properly take place must be open, evidence-based, and involve all the actual stakeholders to the question at issue.
Technophiles who value speedier technological development in the expectation that it will deliver sooner goods of incomparable value, sometimes like to imply that advocates of Precaution are indifferent to the risks that often inhere in refraining to act, or assess actual risks unnecessarily stringently, or exhibit a kind of blanket hostility to the attainments of medical-industrial technocultures on which they themselves depend hypocritically for their own standards of living.
While this is no doubt true of some advocates of Precaution –- and partisans on both sides can of course always find photogenic specimens to trot out in the support of their views -– it ignores the extent to which the Precautionary Principle was introduced precisely in response to damaging corporate-friendly government or self-sponsored research that selectively framed and published its results, and in response to the deployment of impossibly high standards of certainty to create the false impression that widely held, well-founded suspicions and concerns were in fact too controversial to provide a justification for regulation.
Critics of Precaution also tend to ignore that many of the most influential formulations of the Precautionary Principle (which has no definitive or canonical expression) confine their attention to cases of likely nonreversible harm to the health of individuals or to environmental harms that are likely to impose remediation costs higher than the benefits they generate.
Few formulations of the Principle are in fact oblivious to the ineradicable dimension of risk that inheres in all human conduct, including decisions to refrain from action. And while I will grant that it has not yet often been mobilized in arguments of this kind, the Precautionary Principle would seem to me to impel the development and deployment of emerging technologies and techniques to more effectively address global harms, malnutrition and ill-health, certain existential risks that have not hitherto been susceptible of effective response (for example, a defense against asteroid impacts, or a global warning system to inform vulnerable populations of tsunamis and the like).
I have argued that the Precautionary Principle is (or certainly can and should be) infinitely far from the irrationalist celebration of stagnation and hostility to civilization technophiles sometimes seem to want to paint it as. It is, on the contrary, a democratizing deliberative framework for development, at once impelling a fairer distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technological development onto all of its stakeholders, while likewise enlisting the wider collaboration of these stakeholders in the actual process of research and the assessment of its results.
Precaution is not then a repudiation of progress, but the insistence of social democrats that progress, as we all now know, requires both the development of more powerful technologies and the wider empowerment of people through recourse to these technologies. Without both it is never appropriate to speak of a developmental outcome as progressive in the first place.
The force of Harris’ argument depends on his assumption that “[e]veryone in society stands to benefit from research, and indeed has already benefited.” But this is surely contradicted by his own recognition that worries about abuses are “well-founded.” Clearly, for one thing, the victims of such abuses are not straightforward beneficiaries of research in the ways that non-victims are.
This seems rather analogous to the argument of some opponents of Precaution who in celebrating the long-term benefits of development they themselves enjoy often elide the reality of the victims of development over the developmental spans in which they actually lived.
It is quite difficult to imagine that Harris would rephrase his point to suggest that people have a moral obligation to participate in risky research just to ensure that corporations profit more and more swiftly than they otherwise would, whether or not the people taking on these risks benefit themselves. But I want to know precisely why the obligation he proposes would not amount to this more pernicious demand in actual practice.
Now, while he does propose that people have an “obligation” to participate in research for the common good, even when this imposes risks and harms to their own well-being that might not otherwise seem compelling, Harris is thankfully not actually advocating that this moral obligation likewise justifies any kind of legal compulsion to so participate.
But he frankly nudges uncomfortably close to doing precisely that.
According to the Medical News article, Harris “contends that compulsion is, in principle, justifiable, and in certain circumstances, may be justified. And he suggests that a change to the Declaration of Helsinki, which sets out the ethical grounds for research, is warranted.”
In making his case, the article continues on, “Professor Harris points out that other activities in society, such as vaccination the wearing of seatbelts, and jury service, require the loss of personal autonomy for the public good.”
It is not exactly a matter of indifference that in each of the examples offered up here, an arguably rather negligible loss of autonomy corresponds not only to public goods but discernible benefits to the individual herself. Compelling individuals to participate in risky medical research might quite evidently impose incomparable costs without anything like comparable benefits.
Harris concludes his case in a moral register that is much less problematic: "The argument concerning the obligation to participate in research should be compelling for anyone who believes there is a moral obligation to help others, and/or a moral obligation to be just and do one's share. Little can be said to those whose morality is so impoverished that they do not accept either of these two obligations."
This seems to me an uncontroversial claim, but I sense in it a kind of frustration and even resignation that helps account for why Harris might hesitate to confine his argument to the mobilization of nonbinding moral injunctions.
I think Harris would be altogether wrong to succumb even slightly to the lure of compulsion as a way to secure the benefits of medical research (about which I happen to agree with him entirely). And I think it would be wrong for him mischaracterize as hostile or irrational the reasonable expectations of harm and abuse that both inspire the regulation of research and the hesitancy of many individuals to participate in some forms of it, as a way of justifying such compulsion.
But, frankly, I also think he is wrong to despair that beneficial research might not be undertaken in the absence of moral injunction or legal compulsion in the first place.
By way of a conclusion, permit me to sketch an altogether different (and, if I can be forgiven this, rather utopian) sense of the disposition of things.
Although it is difficult to descry such a thing in the midst of American militarism and fundamentalisms (of both the market and theological varieties), I am inclined to believe that the networked civilizations of the developed and developing world are well on their way to finding themselves in a quite self-conscious global project to empower morphological freedom and ameliorate (and to the extent possible even eliminate) nondiscretionary suffering and death. The science seems too proximate and the benefits too palpable for many to resist for long.
However well we fund and regulate medical and other scientific research to these ends, however, it remains true that the effects of therapeutic and enhancement procedures on particular individuals, in unpredictable combinations, and over the various longer time-scales involved are simply impossible to anticipate as well as anyone would like.
This has the consequence that every citizen in the democratizing world should be regarded as not only a legal subject but an "Experimental Subject" as well.
Experimental Subjects are bearers not only of the usual bundle of rights legal citizen-subjects have properly come to expect in social democracies (and which certainly should include at least basic healthcare provision), but should likewise be bearers of a “Stakeholder Grant” providing them the means to participate -- in as competent, informed, accountable, and consensual a way as possible –- in experimental therapeutic and enhancement medical procedures as well.
Unlike Harris, who seems to want to impel or even compel individuals to participate in medical research for the public good, I would argue that we should recognize the extent to which everybody is already participating in such research, as consumers in a vast globally distributed long-term experiment in combination therapy.
It seems to me that as Experimental Subjects in the global medical-industrial complex we all of us already incarnate indispensable data points in what amounts to a vast peer-to-peer project to advance medical and scientific research.
What I propose is simply that we should all actually recognize our indispensability, recognize the literally revolutionary force of this insight, and then demand to be paid for the privilege of so participating.
I would also propose that since we are all expected to relinquish quite a bit of traditional control over the circulation of personal information about the effects of our ongoing participation in this global experimental culture, we should not only demand payment but likewise demand that these results be distributed absolutely freely and transparently to encourage thereby the kind of innovation and accountability that best ensures that the costs and harms we undertake will be minimized and the benefits we enable available to all (including ourselves).
Since Harris suggests himself that “[f]inancial incentives to participate in research are fully justified and preferable to compulsion,” I hope he would be sympathetic to this viewpoint. My only cautionary note in joining with Harris in such a recommendation is to insist that the mode of financial incentivization that seems to me most likely to bear fruit would be one conjoined to a democratizing peer-to-peer model of research, rather than any of the customary market apologist models which we all well know by now would too likely devolve soon enough into the usual demand of “your money or your life.”
These Foolish Things (Scattered Quotations for the Day)
One of my favorite novelists, Gary Indiana, wrote of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film Salo, that it “is one of those rare works of art that really achieves shock value."
He goes on in a winningly Wildean way to say that "[I]t’s always amusing to read the outpourings of some cultural wastebasket decrying an artist who deploys shock ‘for the sake of shock,’ as if to qualify as a work of art, a work of art has to be something other than a work of art – a tutorial in cherished homilies, an affirmation of quotidian values and so on.”
I have been thinking of Salo quite a lot since November, predictably enough -– it’s a film that seems tailor-made for the Bush era, not to put too fine a point on it.
But the thing that really brought the thought of the film to the forefront of my mind today of all days, was a sudden ghastly shock of memory, that that film is framed by the tune “These Foolish Things” which I had been thinking of already as a nice commemoration of the day. The Salo tie-in made it irresistable.
These Foolish Things
(by Marvell, Strachey, and Link)
Oh will you never let me be?
Oh will you never set me free?
The ties that bound us are still around us
There's no escape that I can see
And still those little things remain
That bring me happiness or pain
A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces
An airline ticket to romantic places
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
A tinkling piano in the next apartment
Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant
A fairground's painted swings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
You came, you saw, you conquered me
When you did that to me, I somehow knew that this had to be
The winds of March that make my heart a dancer
A telephone that rings - but who's to answer?
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
Gardenia perfume ling'ring on a pillow
Wild strawb'ries only seven francs a kilo
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
The park at evening when the bell has sounded
The Isle de France with all the girls around it
The beauty that is Spring
These foolish things
Remind me of you
I know that this was bound to be
These things have haunted me
For you've entirely enchanted me
The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations
Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
First daffodils and long excited cables
And candlelight on little corner tables
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
The smile of Garbo and the scent of roses
The waiters whistling as the last bar closes
The song that Crosby sings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
How strange, how sweet to find you still
These things are dear to me
That seem to bring you so near to me
The scent of smould'ring leaves, the wail of steamers
Two lovers on the street who walk like dreamers
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you, just you
At the close of his appreciation of Salo Gary Indiana writes of the horror of the film that has its most perfect expression in what might otherwise be mistaken for a saccharine glimpse of hope beyond the meat-grinder it so joylessly cranks us through.
“These Foolish Things” plays on the radio in the otherwise decimated villa of the Sadean libertines. One fascist guard absurdly waltzes with another and the shot fades as they engage in desultory chit-chat.
“Salo is the pessimistic forerunner of The Matrix,” proposes Gary Indiana. “It would be a gross mistake to read the final shot as ‘hopeful,’ since these two boys, who have, in fact, implicitly survived the storm, are completely the products of its ferocity...
"After the war they’ll get married, reproduce themselves and raise good consumers; their children won’t need fascism to learn how to think alike, just TV and the supermarket.
"For all the overblown, pretentious, even corny ideas Pasolini regularly brought to the cinema, in Salo, I think he hit a nerve that hasn’t gone numb since the film first appeared.
"The theatres and video stores of the Western world offer a glut of more violent, more sexually explicit, more frankly disgusting movies that hardly anyone objects to, but Salo remains, to borrow a phrase, off the reservation, proscribed, unacceptable. One can argue with its monotony, its internal inconsistencies and its didacticism, but its power to disturb something buried very deep in each of us is beyond question.
"Salo is the very model of life as most human beings have known it in the 20th century, a metaphor of feudalism as reinvented by the multinational corporation, the military coup d’etat and the mediation of all reality via the symbolic.”
Happy Fools Day, Fellow Fools. And as Springer would say, “be good to one another.”
He goes on in a winningly Wildean way to say that "[I]t’s always amusing to read the outpourings of some cultural wastebasket decrying an artist who deploys shock ‘for the sake of shock,’ as if to qualify as a work of art, a work of art has to be something other than a work of art – a tutorial in cherished homilies, an affirmation of quotidian values and so on.”
I have been thinking of Salo quite a lot since November, predictably enough -– it’s a film that seems tailor-made for the Bush era, not to put too fine a point on it.
But the thing that really brought the thought of the film to the forefront of my mind today of all days, was a sudden ghastly shock of memory, that that film is framed by the tune “These Foolish Things” which I had been thinking of already as a nice commemoration of the day. The Salo tie-in made it irresistable.
These Foolish Things
(by Marvell, Strachey, and Link)
Oh will you never let me be?
Oh will you never set me free?
The ties that bound us are still around us
There's no escape that I can see
And still those little things remain
That bring me happiness or pain
A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces
An airline ticket to romantic places
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
A tinkling piano in the next apartment
Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant
A fairground's painted swings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
You came, you saw, you conquered me
When you did that to me, I somehow knew that this had to be
The winds of March that make my heart a dancer
A telephone that rings - but who's to answer?
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
Gardenia perfume ling'ring on a pillow
Wild strawb'ries only seven francs a kilo
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
The park at evening when the bell has sounded
The Isle de France with all the girls around it
The beauty that is Spring
These foolish things
Remind me of you
I know that this was bound to be
These things have haunted me
For you've entirely enchanted me
The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations
Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
First daffodils and long excited cables
And candlelight on little corner tables
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
The smile of Garbo and the scent of roses
The waiters whistling as the last bar closes
The song that Crosby sings
These foolish things
Remind me of you
How strange, how sweet to find you still
These things are dear to me
That seem to bring you so near to me
The scent of smould'ring leaves, the wail of steamers
Two lovers on the street who walk like dreamers
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you, just you
At the close of his appreciation of Salo Gary Indiana writes of the horror of the film that has its most perfect expression in what might otherwise be mistaken for a saccharine glimpse of hope beyond the meat-grinder it so joylessly cranks us through.
“These Foolish Things” plays on the radio in the otherwise decimated villa of the Sadean libertines. One fascist guard absurdly waltzes with another and the shot fades as they engage in desultory chit-chat.
“Salo is the pessimistic forerunner of The Matrix,” proposes Gary Indiana. “It would be a gross mistake to read the final shot as ‘hopeful,’ since these two boys, who have, in fact, implicitly survived the storm, are completely the products of its ferocity...
"After the war they’ll get married, reproduce themselves and raise good consumers; their children won’t need fascism to learn how to think alike, just TV and the supermarket.
"For all the overblown, pretentious, even corny ideas Pasolini regularly brought to the cinema, in Salo, I think he hit a nerve that hasn’t gone numb since the film first appeared.
"The theatres and video stores of the Western world offer a glut of more violent, more sexually explicit, more frankly disgusting movies that hardly anyone objects to, but Salo remains, to borrow a phrase, off the reservation, proscribed, unacceptable. One can argue with its monotony, its internal inconsistencies and its didacticism, but its power to disturb something buried very deep in each of us is beyond question.
"Salo is the very model of life as most human beings have known it in the 20th century, a metaphor of feudalism as reinvented by the multinational corporation, the military coup d’etat and the mediation of all reality via the symbolic.”
Happy Fools Day, Fellow Fools. And as Springer would say, “be good to one another.”
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